Certain people, probably many, believe that granting human eyes and human heads access to artworks is a task for language. Words are able to cut their way through the stubborn fog that contemporary art in particular can look like. Words can sprawl out on an accessible square – it could be a wall or a piece of paper – as an instruction manual. Regrettably, it’s almost only by way of words that artworks are allowed to exist. Or so it can seem: funding application words, press release words aimed at facilitating the words of reviewers, words of mediation aimed at securing funding and a wide audience.
Placing responsibility for these mechanisms is difficult. Probably, it’s shared between (contemporary) art detesting politics and well-behaved academics in need of stuff to do. But what seems certain is that a demand for words rarely derives from the artworks themselves. I dress art with language for (part of) a living. Obviously, I believe that words and works can benefit from each other, but I also believe that it only happens if no heavy dependency is at play.
Actually, FOS’s exhibition at the Nils Stærk gallery is full of language, but as is often the case when shows are best, the words are not really uttered. They exist in the title – Words for Works – a kind of wide sentence that sounds like the precursor to a riddle. They exist in the figures and in the scenography-like spatiality. An architecture of fabric rises in the space, creating a more labyrinthically-impassable-chamber vibe than the tall gallery walls are usually capable of (wwww oooo rrrr dddd ssss ffff oooo rrrr wwww oooo rrrr kkkk ssss, 2024).
Doorways and window holes pierce these textile walls which both contain the stiff solidity of canvas and a chilled-out tie-dye look. Shades of rosy pink move towards magenta and a deeper purple, different kinds of peach, stains of blueish, greenish, brownish, the chalky stable-looking ground colour of raw canvas, some yellow splashes. No psy-trance or hippie irony in sight, just moistly beautiful gradients through this temporary house in the house framing the rest of the works.
Four chairs ring a table (30 Minutes Table and 20 Minutes Chair, both 2024) in one of the chambers. Atop the table is a bronze sculpture (()., 2024): a stack of four people, four dinner guests not sitting in the chairs. A possible reservation towards these skilfully designed pieces of furniture feels mandatory, but also quickly quite secondary. Aren’t we done disputing whether or not unconditionally functional objects can appear in a gallery space and be artworks? Or appear in a gallery space and be furniture because who cares?
The fabric construction and its peculiar interior looks like no one’s home, yet it does look like some kind of home, perhaps some kind of house template. Domestic languages are present – furniture, décor, doors, pictures on the walls – but it’s as though all of this just flutters and whispers at the fringes of what we believe a home to be. A glass cylinder with LED strings inside is almost a lamp as it hangs in a corner glowing (The Present Is the Past Factory, 2024). An aluminium box on the wall is practically a bookshelf, but what it contains does not exactly look like a neat living room: some orange rope, a figure in bent glass tubes, an enamelled copper ring, a walnut glued underneath (Enamel, glass, and walnut, 2024).
The theatre- and playhouse-like atmosphere of interior and linen architecture is satiated with language, but what is being said is indeed ambiguous. The kind of nutty idiosyncrasies that can occur when artists, like FOS, seemingly work with anything, but not in ways that come off as sloppy or indecisive.
In one corner, a row of jesmonite rock simultaneously gives off Stonehenge and scaffolding vibes (Ruin, 2024). In another, a rubber arm lies on a little stage of hard, sliced sand (Hands Smooth by Coins, 2019). All this looks like the kind of inscrutable yet convincing matter-of-fact-ness that some artistic practices for some reason ooze – perhaps exactly when they unfold as close to language and narrative and something decodable as FOS’s works do, while still being able to thoroughly evade it all. Here, the feeling of almost understanding is what makes the obscurity great.
I don’t know what’s going on between the fabric corridors at Nils Stærk. What kind of scenario could be played out around that table? Why do two pretty bronze braids suddenly hang so low on those walls? What is the cut-up arm up to with half of an empty Pellegrino bottle that it can never reach? But I know that the gaze can plunge right through a low window hole so that the rubber fingers look like television or puppet theatre. I know that somewhere in the canvas architecture a particular blue possesses a kind of pale airiness similar to evenings about to get brighter. I know that the welding and stitching and framing look like meticulousness and precision and that the chair’s coiled metal legs resemble a beautiful animal from an age we haven’t fully arrived at.
If figuration belongs with language and abstraction with the wordless, then this exhibition is as chatty as it is quiet.
