Kristian Touborg
Balancing Time Between your eyes
17.01. 07.03.2020
Mikael Andersen
Bredgade 63
1260 Copenhagen
Images courtesy the artist and Mikael Andersen gallery
Photos: Jan Søndergaard
In the Western world time has become a resource which is often scarce. Optimization and structuring of our fleeting time and relations, at work as well at home, is a fundamental condition in our modern society. And in a time where even our smallest virtual movements are monitored while global tech companies mine our most private conversations for data, our notions of intimacy have become increasingly digital.
Do feelings attached to the image of a loved one posted to Instagram vanish as it is reproduced in new and unfamiliar digital networks by strangers? Has the Internet taught us how to be intimate by making distance a common denominator we all find comfort in? Is life lived in the distance between our eyes and our screens? Has our ability to maintain a virtual (omni)presence while we live our lives changed the ecology of images by making them reusable?
Balancing Time Between Your Eyes shows a series of highly personal, intimate and emotional works that subtly exist in the blurred area between the analogue and the digital. In the tension field between sculpture and painting, Touborg creates evocative and sensuous works where painterly gestures, bright colours and specs of silvery reflections create a strong poetic presence, both tactile and coolly distanced.
In Balancing Time Between Your Eyes, Kristian Touborg’s alluring compositions; a careful mixture of figurative and abstracted extracts, set the scene for rhizomatic and interlinked, yet wholly autonomous works in which lively dialogues are established between repetition and variations in both colour and form. In these works, we encounter glimpses of memories and the feeling of time rushing through our minds while we are submerged in the blue light of our digital screens.
Although his paintings might appear to depict something ‘real’; for example, a familiar bedroom scene of two people equally lit up by the piercing blue light from a mac, as well as the evocative moon light, there are, in fact, no ‘originals’. Reproductions in various materials have been sewn together with canvas, leaving the viewer with a myriad of impressions.
Instead of merely drawing attention to the shift in how intimacy is constituted and monitored by technology, Touborg himself employs the technology and embeds these strategies within the works: thus, engaging in discussions concerning mimesis, repetition, simulacrum, and the role of the artist split between notions of the classical creator and the painter as a human graphics processing unit.