A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

– Adam's Curse, W.B. Yeats

Larsen Warner is excited to present Drifter, a solo presentation by Mercedes Ardelius Blane. This is the artists first solo exhibition in Stockholm since her MA graduation presentation at Kungliga Konsthögskolan, Stockholm in September 2020.

Ardelius Blane is drawn towards a melting point of language, written signs, image and illusions; gathering inspiration from image-based sign systems such as hieroglyphs, early Chinese pictograms and ancient rock paintings as well as the shared heritage of words and images – and the merging of these elements into signs. In Drifter, the artist continues to evolve these components and at the same time through her immersive installation, we see an artist begin to shift focus to visual forms in the process of transformation – dissolving, doubling and shapeshifting.

The artist borrows fragments of written characters and imaginative objects, without the motifs becoming directly readable or fully recognizable. Shifting the viewers perception and making them question exactly what they appear to be looking at, Ardelius Blane has developed sophisticated illusory techniques for creating spatial visual ‘games’ and imitations of an eclectic array of materials; A canvas can be experienced as solid and heavy as stone, or flowing as easily as rippling, flowing water. Through this, the surface becomes a two-dimensional space where the audience can project their fantasies and fictions and where characters without nailed meaning and materials with different status coexist on the same surface. The composing elements of the paintings include sand and water, scribbles and markings, and the space they evoke becomes both future and archaic. A reoccuring motif is an anthropomorphic insect, a mantis or a cricket maybe, in various stages of metamorphosis.  The motifs within the paintings always relate to the surface. They break away from the image plane - floating freely on top or carved and scraped into it, giving a tantilising glimpse into the painting’s inner workings.

Ardelius Blane utilises an eclectic array of materials in the creation of her paintings with sand, cat litter, hobby spray paint and wall paint mixing with oil paint and canvas as equal information carriers. Each material choice is processed in a different way in order to achieve the desired effect, such as the rugged surface of an archaeological excavation or the lightness of drifting clouds. These seemingly  eclectic materials carry meaning in the same way as the stretchers, canvas and oil paint of ‘traditional’ painting. The artist works with a painting simultaneously as a topographical landscape, a space, and as a plain surface with enjoyment taken from both the tactility of materials as well as the illusory aspect of the work. The paintings are installed against a broken up landscape of blue painted canvases, with the walls completely covered to create a cavern like atmosphere within the gallery space.  Each canvas is painted wet on wet, allowing the wall paint to break up in its different pigments and flow freely, before it sinks and sets into the fabric as an impression of its own movement, depicting the flow of water.

Mercedes Ardelius Blane (b.1986) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Ardelius Blane received her MA from Kungliga Konsthögskolan, Stockholm in 2020, and graduated with her BA in fine art from Slade School of Fine Arts, London in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include Wordmongers Well, Galleri Mejan, Stockholm (2019) and Soft kernel, OCH Galleri, Stockholm (2018). Selected group exhibition include Graduation Show, Kungliga Konsthögskolan, Stockholm (2020); The Easter Group Show, Galleri Thomassen, Göteborg (2019); GIFC, The Hole NYC, New York (2019); Twelfth night, or what you will, Coyote, Stockholm (2019). Ardelius Blane was also the focus of a feature in Artlover Magazine issue #44 (2020)