DISTINCT FUNCTIONAL LAYERS HELP ESTABLISH HIERARCHY AND ORDER

29.01.2016 - 09.04.2016

Text by Angus Cook

One thing is for sure: the blue lights are no metaphor for mind-control. Rather, questions of mind-control may be understood as a metaphor for the bidirectional relationship of artwork to viewer.

Is it mere coincidence that blue and pink are the colors with the most compelling scientific evidence to support their use as medicine?

That they are similar in this respect is somewhat curious because these particular colors strike me as more chromatically polarized than black and white or red and green.

Color as medicine is a strange idea.

But not as strange as color as medicine as art.

The installation is composed of juxtapositions—visual, cognitive, emotional. Painting and sculpture. Stable and unstable. Daydream and nightmare. Appearance and reality. Freedom and control. Public discourse and the world of the imagination. Life and death. These and other polarities, whose mutual incompatibility is emphasized by way of their juxtaposition, are simultaneously merged by the closeness of their contact, and exchange then lose their ostensible identities.

The tension that is created by this system of opposing forces produces an instability that becomes both an integral part of the structure, and the energy that ultimately undermines it. The destructive instability is in turn counteracted by further emergent layers.

Difference becomes sameness, as sameness becomes something else again.

The very principles of juxtaposition, by which the installation operates, are counteracted by that something else again. Nothing is as it seems because nothing is allowed to stay the same—visually, cognitively, emotionally.

About the exhibition

The exhibition presents a new installation and works on paper. The installation consists of three light posts, each with four blue LED lamps of a kind used on specific train stations in Japan. The supposed anti-depressive color of the light is intended to reduce the number of suicides committed on these stations. The paintings on paper are created using fluorescent pink paint.

The exhibition is Einarsson’s fourth solo exhibition in the gallery. Einarsson has previously had solo exhibitions in institutions such as ARoS, Aarhus Art Musuem, DK, Bergen Kunsthall, NO, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, DE, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, SE, Reykjavik Art Museum, IS, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, NO, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, US, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneve, CH, Museum St. Louis, US, Frankfurter Kunstverein, DE, Swiss Institute, New York, US amongst others. Einarsson lives and works in Tokyo.