Plastasia: “The physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance these systems.”
There is something peaceful and day dreamy, yet anxious and uncanny about the desolate tableaus in Luca Bjørnstens newest body of work.
The paintings consists of large solid colored surfaces and blobs. In a way, they keep the sensation of being sticky paint, as they form motives, sliding in and out between being abstract and figurative.
It is not difficult to see what is depicted: A Shell gas station, a supermarket shelf with detergent powder, a row of FedEx aircrafts at an Airport. However, the motives seem to be unstable, as if made from grout or chewing gum, about to topple or melt. There is something amusing and absurd about the paintings’ doomed gooiness and clumsy shapes, but slowly you get a creeping sense that something is hiding
under the surface, down there, in the plaster. Is this real life?
In Plastasia, the motives are characterized by mass production and consumerism. The paintings are sections of the reality we know, but Bjørnsten recreate it in a way where it becomes alien to us. As if seen by an extraterrestrial arriving to Earth, not knowing the conventions, rules and context, essential for modern infrastructure to make sense.
As a viewer, you get the opposite experience of a déjà vu: The feeling of something familiar becoming unfamiliar and strange. And this alienation gives us an opportunity to dwell on the sculptural value of
the motives, on the beauty of a border shop with duty free M&M’s.
