Torben Ribe
IMO, Copenhagen, Denmark
The global financial crisis has, quite paradoxically, also had a creative impact on the art scene in Copenhagen. One of the affected spaces is IMO, an ambitious artist-run gallery situated in a new gallery area alongside prominent galleries such as Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Gallery Nils Stærk and the Royal Academy’s exhibition space, BKS Garage. This month an extensive painting exhibition by one of the artists who runs the space, Torben Ribe, is on view.
In his recent series of paintings, Ribe depicts what could be called ‘interior situations’ – though they are the kind of interiors that we would happily put behind us. Sawdust wallpapers painted with a sponge in colours such as lime green, pink or baby blue are displayed together with the utilitarian necessities we’d rather not look at: wires, ventilators, wall sockets. What is being framed here are arrangements that most of us would pay money to hide, repair or even demolish. Moreover, it turns out that these domestic fragments all have an inherent problem resulting from shoddy construction work: in one painting, mould is about to destroy the wallpaper, in another, a slimy substance clings to the surface (maybe in an attempt to create further ‘creative’ effects, but a cloth on the wall shows that the effort was in vain). The paintings direct our attention towards the failed attempts of some anonymous ‘handyman’ trying to solve a specific problem, but the solution ends up creating yet another problem to be solved. For instance, white paint has been used in vain to cover the coloured clinkers of a bathroom in the painting Colours of Harmony (Pregnant) (2010).
Despite the fact that Ribe’s paintings depict home improvements gone wrong, it is clear that a genuine craftsmanship has been put into each of them to make the failures look authentic. The result could have been somewhat stiff, because of his efforts to be accurate and precise in the failure-making, but there is actually a sort of underlying sympathetic humour in each of them.
One tendency in contemporary painting, in an effort to find new ways of presenting and exhibiting this enduring medium, has been to investigate and explore the boundaries between the canvas and the surrounding room. In Ribe’s show the paintings are cleverly presented on backgrounds of various colours, making a redundancy of the paintings’ ‘wall situations’, as the entire exhibition space with its piles, ventilations, grips and socket outlets becomes part of the exhibition and turns it into one large installation. But even if the good old tradition of transforming everyday banal reality into art objects, my favourite paintings in this exhibition are the ones that seem to wrest themselves out of the overall intention of showing authentic but unwanted or failed interiors, and instead just show a wall with different light bulbs as in Quiet (2010) (who has light bulbs coming out of the wall like that?). These works suggest that Ribe is at his best when he lets go of realism and makes more poetic and abstract investigations of interior objects, instead of cool registered extracts from ugly corners of the room.
Maria Kjær Themsen
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
