Marking the outset of gallerists Niklas Belenius and Erik Nordenhake’s collaboration with Malmö-based Swedish artist Alexander Gutke, this show presents works from 2007 to 2014: enticing cinematic and sculptural situations that emphasise his minimalist tendencies and continuing rapport with the conceptual. The works exhibited have no clear beginning or end; it’s hard to tell if they are to be viewed on their own or together as a melange of impressions, like chapters of a novella. Alongside three recent videos are a number of objects, themselves often harbouring an illusory quality reminiscent of directing techniques incorporated by auteurs like Andrei Tarkovsky, who is known to highlight life’s dreamlike essence. These works seem like keys one might need to gain access to a more insightful state. Gutke has long investigated his relationship to film – dissecting the physical and technical aspects of analogue film as well as questioning ways in which cinema manipulates narrative structures with the viewer’s pleasure in mind. He uses cameras, celluloid and slide projectors as tools to unravel the complexities of existentialism, metaphysics and the possibility of boundlessness; these apparatuses provide Gutke with opportunities to survey the poetic and self-reflexive. The viewer, gliding through the space, may accordingly be inclined to turn his or her interpretative lens inward.
In Gutke’s work, high sentiments are relayed via selective usage of light and space. Shades of gold float on a black background as subdued flames engulf a vintage matchbook in his six-minute video Draw (Gold) (2014). In Loud, Loud (2014), the brass volume-knob of a classic, tube-driven Marshall amplifier – blown up into a sculptural enlargement (137.5 percent of an actual knob) and resembling at once a small clock and a miniature schematic sun – serves as a solitary wall piece. Yet it performs no time-telling function; its integers for measurement appear quizzical in that they feature no numbers, only lines, except for ‘10’, which is placed near the bottom and appears twice, once reversed, like a straightforward reflection. As noted by Livia Paldi in the press release, the amp knob – in part also shorthand for another analogue technology, like film – is ‘attuned to the scale and proportions of its immediate surroundings [and is] inspired by [Gutke’s] subjective experience of a spectrum of noise qualities from unwanted random to expressive musical, and from loud to barely audible’. The analogue, the cosmic and processes of mirroring here explicitly fold together.
The sheer weight of infinity, as a theme, appears strongest in works like Untitled (for Christian Andersson) (2007), where one is able to see inside a lone black box resembling an intimate portal; the box opens from its side, allowing access to a two-way mirror and accompanying light tubes altering depth perception. Additionally, Measure (2011) playfully engages with eternity, being a brass measuring tape folded into a Möbius strip. ‘We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors,’ noted Stanisław Lem in his novel Solaris (1961). If this is the case, what is to be said about an exhibition such as Gutke’s, which allows room for both to exist under its neomodernist umbrella? Look to the artist’s installation of modular design titled Folded into One (2012), cardboard boxes printed similarly inside and out with a recurring stellar pattern, for your own answer.
This article was first published in the March 2015 issue.
