A series of Overlap Sculptures is presented here by Matias Faldbakken (b. 1973, Hobro/Oslo). These consist of assembled sculptures where layered copies of the same image are applied on found objects, such as pieces of furniture. These images are applied in the object sequenced as if the result of a digital pop-up window, bringing a replicant quality or a Photoshop trace to the three-dimensional object.
A recurrent machinic tension drives through Faldbakken’s sculptural work. Compressed aluminum ladders, lockers, and concrete planes act as barriers and counterweights, affecting the body of the viewer with their hermetic qualities. This blockage, which seems to inherit as much from writer J.G. Ballard as from dark humor or the legacy of Conceptualism, is of special interest to the artist, who refers to this “space between messages of almost totalitarian regime simplicity and gestures of uncommunicative abstraction” as a “space of potential.”
The roadside quality of some of the works nears the anarchism of denial, as its form addresses the social delusion that seems to haunt Faldbakken, also a writer and prolific novelist. These “objects of reticence” have turned their backs to us, and yet they are still there; in their sheer physicality, they stand encrypted, vandalized, resigned. Take for example Locker Sculptures #4 (2014), where a series of aluminium gymnasium lockers are squashed against a wall. What can we say when they confront us with their oppressive materiality? Is there a possibility for transcendence in opacity?
Despite the fact that – as in the work of the Situationists, the avant-garde artistic and intellectual movement from Paris active in the ’60s – we can trace a strategy of withdrawal and rejection in Faldbakken’s oeuvre, we can also detect an immense communicative potential, either in its Fordist qualities, or through the expressive imprint of damaged objects that amplify the broader political context of suppressed anger we live in. MM
self-presentation:
1. I wrote a contract with a childhood buddy when we were 15–16 years old, stating that we would never sign up for a steady job. I still stick to that.
2. I saw an exhibition of portrait drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1993. It made a huge impact on me.
3. Henrik Plenge Jakobsen and Jes Brinch came to the Academy in Bergen, Norway, at the time when I was a student, and showed their vandalist interventions. That changed a lot for me.
4. I became friends with Gardar Eide Einarsson and he made me pull myself together—just by being an example of humor, smartness, and relentless drive.
5. I found out that my output was as much about words as visuals, so I started to write fiction. This separation was a crucial realization for me.
6. I stayed in Norway, instead of going “to the continent,” for good or bad.
