Matias Faldbakken

Matias Faldbakken
Le Consortium, 37 Rue de Longuic, 21000 Dijon, France
12 October 2013 - 26 January 2014
From the Press Release

The enfant terrible of contemporary Scandinavian art, Matias Faldbakken is still little known in France. He represented Norway at the Venice Biennale in 2005, and had his first retrospective - Shocked into Abstraction - at the National Museum of Fine Art in Oslo in 2009. It is primarily as a writer under the pseudonym Abo Rasul that Faldbakken that caused a sensation. The acid humor and provocative trilogy hit - Trilogy Mysanthropie Scandinavian composed of Macht und Rebel Coka Hola Company - has provoked many reactions: admiration and shock in Norway as well as in Germany, where it was adapted for the theatre. Pornography, anarchy, racism, despair, the trilogy is characterized by a frontal approach that is reflected in his plastic work.

In the first works Faldbakken readily cites actions associated with those whom society has identified as threats: terrorists, drug addicts, graffitists… Multiplying the gestures of destruction or abandonment, Faldbakken - by just expressing “the will to express nothing” - maintains a balance, which saves his work from the naivety of cynicism, while choosing to expose it.

Faldbakken adds specific interventions, which avoid continually referring painting and sculpture in the same way. For example, in one piece, he simply threw to the ground several shelves of the library, and at a Power Station in Dallas, he covered the floor with bullets from a revolver. In Kassel, he emptied extinguishers in one of the rooms of the Biennale staining his works a grayish residue.

In recent years, the artist has replaced the direct references to the sub-culture that characterised the beginning of his work, more neutral resources to everyday objects and universal references. For example tape, plastic bags, cardboard boxes, metal cabinets refrigerators from the main compositions. Welded, compressed, or cut, these banal materials allow the artist to take the works around the world and install them in places where they can correspond to the function and realities associated with them.

This alternative retrospective shows how Faldbakeen attacks critical foundations that modernity has assigned to art, in order to open up further discussions between the art, the artist and the company they have created and to which they belong.