Zven Balslev | Signs

In the watercolors, the “signs” take various forms: as fictional magazine and comics covers or crooked and distorted children’s book illustrations. All paperwork is watercolored automatic drawings, and are as such the result of both a controlled process and the fact that the pen has moved freely over the paper without thinking about the motivic end result – a discipline that was developed by the surrealists and later cultivated by i.a. the author and visual artist Unica Zürn, whose oeuvre has been a significant inspiration for the creation of the exhibition.

For the Surrealists, the automatic drawing was a quest to shorten the path from the unconscious to the paper. Balslev is also concerned with this mechanism. At the same time, his use of automatism reveals a predilection for what from an art historical perspective is often described as banal low culture or mass entertainment: cartoons, computer games, comics, joke drawings.

A recurring theme in the watercolors is the metamorphosis: the body in change, on its way to another form; the moment the pupa turns into an insect, or the toad crawls into the stage as a tail toad.

The watercolors are all A4 format and made daily, on the go. However, Balslev’s approach to making his new series of paintings for the exhibition has been different, partly because the creation due to the formats of the works and the slowly drying oil color is tied to the studio’s more focused situation, but paradoxically the paintings appear more loose and playful, naive and coloristic and narratively open than the watercolors.

For Balslev the abstract, nonfigurative is a tool that points to the unknown, the uncanny. As in his painting The Door, which is compositionally divided into two fields and in a way borrows from the visual logic of the movie. The use of the abstract is thus reminiscent of scenes from the horror and sci-fi genre, as in John Carpenter’s The thing, 1984, where something indefinable from space hits Antarctica.