The Only Things That Makes Reality, is you.

Lars Mathisen

Stalke Galleri, Vesterbrogade 14A

8.3. to 3.4.1996

PRESS RELEASE

STALKE invites the public to the opening of the exhibition

The Only Thing That Makes Reality, Is You
(New Safe Condition & Dead End Path works by Lars Mathisen)

The visual artist Lars Mathisen has since 1991 exhibited a variety of different works—primarily installation-based pieces—under the overarching title: Safe Condition. The title and the individual works have been supplemented by subtitles that relate to the specific placement or theme of the works. The themes have revolved around memory and the choice between safety and life in the present. The concepts of TIME and SPACE are thus linked to the context in which each individual Safe Condition work has been installed and presented (1)

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Alongside the Safe Condition project, Lars Mathisen began his last year working on a Polaroid-based project titled Dead End Path (2). A series of wall-mounted works where Polaroids, the passepartout, and the frame, combined into a unity of color or material, appear as image-boards. The distance between the various functions—frame, passepartout, and motif—is removed, and the composition of motifs creates a spatiality that is simultaneously round in the image. It is Lars Mathisen's intention with Dead End Path to position a situation where one could see oneself as being part of the room's function and the viewer’s presence as part of the installation's work process.

The Only Thing That Makes Reality, Is You is an exhibition consisting of a spatial installation and several smaller and larger works. The two projects, Safe Condition and Dead End Path, intertwine in the exhibition, and Mathisen confronts the exhibition with the ambiguous questions of these two projects about a state of both physical and mental safe condition and a perceptual and cognitive confinement.

The Only Thing That Makes Reality, Is You utilizes Lars Mathisen's text as seen in earlier Safe Conditionpresentations, in a theatrical form. The Only Thing That Makes Reality, Is You partly unfolds through newspapers that show general photographic reproductions of himself as well as these images edited into general recognition of communication and repetition. But the newspaper/news presentation is different in these works with its humorous tone—a layer of text’s content fused with the aesthetic presentation of the image. "The Portrait" is used in a more narrowly defined sense of classical curiosity directed at "the other/the one." A form of recognition of self-questions for the viewer as values and self-reflection around a world and around art. The exhibition thus plays on the viewer's opportunity to meet the theatrical idea: to be the only thing—among other things.

(1) Art Library Puzzle Panel Gentofte Kunstbibliotek 1991.
HO OH Graphic and layout by HVEDEKORN 4 1991.
Shooting Gallery "Black Box 2" organized by GLOBE 1993.
Lost In Paradise DR-TV Faktas 1993.
Live Play Act Kunstmuseet Malmö 1995.
Neptune Charlottenborg After-Year Exhibition 1995.
Document In The Past Perfect State Filmcentralen 1996.
*(2) Dead End Path publicly debuted as part of "Status 2" STALKE.
The first of ten images and published newspaper copies premiered in Malmö.