Fredrik Værslev
Circus, Berlin, Germany
The six paintings neatly aligned in one corner of Circus in Berlin are part of the new series of ‘terrazzo’ paintings by Norwegian artist Fredrik Værslev. The artist produced the works – all Untitled (2011) – through a process of aging, staining and marking the canvases using a variety of paints in various colours, a solvent and a chemical used to prevent the corrosion of metal. Composed in terms of the dispersion of drips and drops as well as faint stains and wayward strokes, the paintings can be described best by the term ‘all-over’. Displaying little marked variation across each of their compositions, each work’s claim on space thus lies along a binary of indefinite pictorial depth and surface flatness. Any concrete sense of movement in relation to space that the paintings did possess resulted from their installation, their having nearly masked that corner and thus having feigned to be architecture; although a rupture occurred as the viewer turned the corner to face the adjacent painting, one was quickly thrown back onto an even keel, since these canvases exhibit a relatively similar density and quality of marks.
Over the course of six months, from mid-spring until mid-autumn, Værslev left these canvases unstretched and laid along the ground outside, prone to the elements. As such, the sense of time they embody is comparable to their sense of space: it differentiates between long periods of relinquished activity and short bursts of focused work. As the artist recently explained in an interview in Mousse, although the inspiration for the earlier paintings from this body of work was an attempt to mimic the appearance of an exhibition space’s terrazzo floor, with these new works he has moved away from that point of reference in order to focus on the procedure contributing to the works’ appearance. These paintings embody wear, wherein resides the primary and quite profound dichotomy of the works. The wear that the works exhibit looks akin to a painter’s studio drop cloth or a painter’s paint-splattered trousers. Like paint-splattered trousers, which can be worn by professionals, hobbyists and poseurs alike, it is the earnestness of their producer’s intention and the virtue of his or her labour that can lend integrity to such by-products of creation.
To prevent us from falling prey to a romantic or mythologized notion, the exhibition text explicates that an attitude of playfulness motivated the production of these works. The text, reproduced from Roger Caillois’s book Les jeux et les hommes (Man, Play and Games, 1958), consists primarily of a series of imperatives qualified by conditions such as: ‘Soil them. Rub dark tea into the fabric to give them a soiled look […] fun: the activity is chosen for its light-hearted character’. Such terms, which inform – if not actually describe – Værslev’s method, are neither the mechanical processes outlined in Richard Serra’s Verb List Compilation (1967–8), nor do they invoke irrationality in the way of John Cage’s chance operations. However, like Serra’s and Cage’s, Værslev’s efforts are in the pursuit of art, so this is no mere game. And his products are recognizably artworks, so they do not clearly argue for a redefinition of the conditions of life. Rather, they push for the continued redefinition of art to include simply playing at it. The title of the exhibition, ‘The Secrets of Aging Well’, suggests that Værslev believes in the value of lasting recognition while also suggesting that reception, too, can be tricked or played, if one knows how. Itself quite elucidating, the title implies taking the easy way out without sacrificing all that comes from going about something the hard way.
John Beeson
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