Underpainting is a sport of fiction. To call it so somehow distorts the timeline of a painting’s operations. One is not setting off under the blanket of night to build the walls for the house with an already weathered roof. The walls, the stairs, the wooden floors, and recessed pantries are the aforementioned and structural “under,” declared only after the fact, but always already there. Underpainting, like fiction when it performs its insidious suspension, need not be incanted. This is the state of arrival in Michael Kennedy Costa’s newest suite of paintings: we are caught unawares, already immured.
And this is the bewilderment. At 8×16”, we are alert to our bodies, floating though they may be; our feet have evaded us as our perpendicular cleaves the paintings’ horizontal. As heads scan surfaces, pleading for entry, our eyes report back to the cartesian body while our minds dive under. Somehow they can because of this two-head-scaled format. There’s a surreptitious breath their composition holds as our eyes sprint their width almost to run away from the staid mirror size and simultaneously defeat it. It is within this athleticism that our gaze is returned. Pricked by “figures” that emerge (colored-pencil marks, sgraffito, pulsating declarative forms), our sight is seized. Contrastive palettes and crisp delineative marks lock our eyes and so too our gait; still, escape is viable, though dialectically only already within.
The penetrative stare of these paintings swells our temples; the tides of their composure beckon haste, with time only to glance their lunge, shut our eyelids, and plunge through for refuge. The deciduous layers of these surfaces tap our skulls to stir vision, but that which these paintings awaken does not belong to us. If it did, our sight would tell us our legs still had feet. Here, incarnate is fiction’s ruse. Rousing the plot’s pentimenti to squelch the first person in its third person rapture, the mis-recognized underpainting inverts itself. Our linear read is imbricated: painting there becomes circumstantial witness here. Sultry and deeply material, Kennedy Costa’s painted-under surfaces recast vision to the thing that sees.
— Mona Welch, Los Angeles, 2024
With the exhibition Milk Plus, Jens Settergren examines in a magnificent and sensory-saturated video installation the collective images linked to the human body and its reproduction, optimization and commercialization in our time.
With an interest in power and the imaginary world of modern society in all that it entails of high technology and constant improvement, Settergren presents a multi-channel video installation that takes the form of a surreal milk advertisement. In a hypnotizing and sensory-stimulating way, the work transports the audience into a separate and synthetic universe, where milk possesses a fascinating and transformative power beyond the usual.
In Milk Plus, the pervasive presence of milk is essential as it has a stream of strong and opposing connotations attached to it in our society and language. Milk evokes associations with nourishment and connection both physically and psychologically between mother and child. Here, milk is associated with innocence and purity. At the same time, milk is used as a metaphor for material wealth and our economies designed to “milk” every resource. In Milk Plus, this takes shape in Settergren’s imagery, when the advertising-like velvety soft and chalk-white milk flows in slow-motion before our gaze, and is sometimes animated in a creation-mythological manner to possess its own agency. The milk is both tempting, but also disturbing in view of the advertising’s goal of increased consumption, when magical worlds are created in which our imagination and desire are not limited.
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