It seems a strange coincidence that Matias Faldbakken's Sacks|Trunks will coincide with the 10th anniversary of the Vauxhall Art Car Boot Fair at Brick Lane. Their website says that The Art Car Boot Fair was an idea that grew out of a desire to pick up where Joshua Compston’s ‘Fete Worse than Death’ and Gavin Turk’s ‘Livestock Market’ and Articultural Shows’ blazed a trail in the 90’s.
Matias Faldbakken's practice explores the opposing notions of proposition and cancellation, vandalism and erasure, aesthetic generosity and conceptual restraint, the possibility of language and its abstraction into illegibility. This idea of abstraction is often associated with acts of destruction as evinced in the 2009 work Abstracted Car, which consists only of a vehicle’s burnt remains. (shown in Matias Faldbakken, Shocked into Abstraction, IKON Gallery 2010)
In his current exhibition Sacks|Trunks at Simon Lee Gallery, Faldbakken again employs the car as medium for abstraction and points to his continued interest in the poverty of materials, an interest which places his practice in dialogue with the problems of modernist modes of presentation and representation including those of the arte povera movement. The trunks (boots) of four small cars are positioned in an accord with a series of wall mounted framed canvas sacks. Flayed open and painted on their backs, it is only in the areas where the paint is dense enough to bleed through the fibres of the canvas sacking that it is seen, hence the support simultaneously reveals and conceals the painted gesture. Alongside these works Faldbakken has installed four sculptures made from stripped car boots - on one of these the Hyundi badge is still visible. The online press release for the show explains that "as vehicles for transport (and exchange) the car boot is also charged with pop cultural history (the UK car boot sale) and is often associated with (fictional) violence (illegal trade, abduction, and so on); a frequently recurring themes in Faldbakken’s work."
"Both sacks and trunks can be considered a development of Faldbakken’s ‘container works’, which include jugs, jerry cans, bags, lockers, bottles, books, VHS cassettes, cardboard boxes and more. Subject to various manipulations and often rendered useless; stacked, crushed, flattened, painted, cut, ‘everted’, spilling their contents, becoming their own content, the containers that Faldbakken adapts often veer between the iconic and the almost painfully generic."
ref: http://www.simonleegallery.com/artists/matias_faldbakken/exhibitions/2013_05/press_release.html
