Images courtesy the artist and Kerstin Engholm gallery

From the beginning David Hanvald has been concerned with finding means to
circumvent or subvert the act of painting, the choice of artistic devices, and aesthetic
decision-making. Hanvald does not merely intend to question the will as a formative
power but to strategically negate this instance. He specifically counters the notion of
the “skillful” picture as confidently developed by the artist in relation to space through
the use of playful, aleatoric, or even random elements as definitive of an aesthetic of
production. A lack of orientation in his process forms the crux of his aesthetic
strategy. The material is to be made to “function” within the aesthetic process,
without being instrumentalized by the impetus of genius. For Hanvald, the greatest
possible moment of freedom is founded on the material and not on the status of the
artist in the context of the painting process.
Hanvald is interested in the non-image, for example the painting’s periphery. In a
number of his paintings dating from recent years, the edge of the painting becomes
the actual object of investigation. Blocks of color are grouped around an empty
center and seem to indicate the underlying frame of the canvas, sometimes
apparently forming its shadow. This is by no means an act of depiction; these areas
of the painting are defined by colorful-abstract and almost gestural markings.
In Construction Toy / Der Baukasten Hanvald presents an arrangement of images, a
composition that unfolds in space and veritably “goes around the corner.” The
impression that it conveys—of an extended wall of building blocks—is not
coincidental. Hanvald has shaped the canvases like bricks. The constellation of
paintings, the composition of the work, can thus be assembled differently each time.
The application of paint to the individual components suggests markings. Through
the most minimal artistic intervention possible, they transform the two-dimensional
building elements into potentially aesthetic units of construction. To a certain extent
Hanvald’s ironic and iconoclastic series of images leaves the viewer perplexed.
Where one expects to find an image, one discovers an apparently random
arrangement. Nevertheless, despite all his efforts to subvert the intentional act of
pictorial creation, he manages to present the viewer with a space of aesthetic
possibility, in which one’s own gaze is engaged as a formative agens—a process that
is thus made obvious and observable.