At his solo exhibition at VAN ETTEN, Espen Kvålsvoll (b.1992, Trondheim) shows a selection of paintings and drawings produced in 2020.
These paintings form imaginary spaces and deserted landscapes. Ruins and scent hounds allude the presence of civilization. Distorted movement forms and leads us through the landscape.

At times we are led on further up a path or restrained when a cave blocks the view. This navigation through and in the landscape is reflected in the title of the exhibition; Scent hound, sniffing, searching through the landscape, creating new paths, angles and viewpoints until it finds its prey. In that moment the surroundings freeze, a symbiosis occurs.
The final motif is established. Colors starts to glow. The motifs staged with exaggerated light sources. In a similar gesture to a child holding a flashlight beneath the chin to make his spooky tale more thrilling.

Abandoned ruins, animals, objects and landscapes are forged together by motifs and sources retrieved across time and space. They become isolated from their origin and mystified. The materiality of the canvas informs and translates into their facades by means of texture and surface. In the same way as you can spot each brick of a building, the paintings’ constructions are built as façades of brushstrokes.
Compositions plays with the illusion of weight and crookedness, where they are on the verge of collapsing. The facades and constructions are in a melting decay while simultaneously blocking the view. The original motifs and sources are deconstructed and revealed in their new context, which creates pictorial spaces and compositions. The process also leads to and results in singular motifs and figures formed as compound memory hybrids.

 

Espen Kvålsvoll (b. 1992, Trondheim) lives and works in Oslo. He completed his MFA at Oslo National Academy of the Arts / Academy of Fine Art in 2019. Previous exhibitions include LNM (Oslo) and NoPlace (Oslo).

The exhibition is supported by TRONDHEIM KOMMUNE, NORSKE BILLEDKUNSTERE (NBK) and KULTURRÅDET