Holohåla

May 10 - June 17, 2012

Paradox. Even the school of life has its graduation day. The question is whether or not the education you have received will be sufficient when at last you exit through the school gates. The answer is really very uncertain.

Some art can on the other hand be seen to embody certainty. For me, a work of art with a sense of certainty is often simply a dull form of distraction, except perhaps in those cases where a manifestation of extreme aesthetic beauty and visual suggestion is in evidence. The works in this exhibition have perhaps passed through the aforementioned school gates, everything seems highly uncertain. These paintings show an identifiable world with a particularly local character; forests, beaches, back yards, snow, roads, bushes etc. Different places, often shrouded in shadow, are infected with various phenomena, figurations, fire and faltering chemistry. The familiar, which can often be found in my locally sourced everyday life, shows itself from its less well-known, incomprehensible side. This incomprehensibility surrounds and flows through the instrumental alphabets that our society uses in order to obtain some form of consensus.

Knowledge is measurable and is by definition entirely relative. Chaos is by nature impossible to recognise, it is the zero that does not exist but which contains everything. Our rational world is based upon mankind’s raging against the indifferent chaos of the Earth. Faltering communication, misunderstandings, dirt, dross and tics, disconnections in time and space etc, are monumentally underrated as points of reference and as formative phenomena in our private and social contexts. In the familiar and incomprehensible visuality of dreams we can find ourselves close to the sudden and almost brutal feeling of crystal-clear fog and lost certainty, which I have attempted to nail down on these canvases.

Romanticism, ”difficult” avant-garde modernism, unpolished surrealism, witchcraft, suspended animation, billiards, and possibly a number of political mistakes, are a few of the wells of inspiration that I have drawn from when I have worked on these pieces. Not to mention the forest in Handen.

Max Book
Kolartorp, April 2012

Other Exhibitions:
Max Book