Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, November 2 – December 22, 2012
The absent question mark and all caps in the title of Matias Faldbakken’s
exhibition, SHALL I WRITE IT, is telling. It’s a bored, sarcastic, rhetorical
statement, and even before we see anything we know as well as he does that
there will no such generous outpouring of words or meaning. But Faldbakken
still goes through the motions of staging a reply, opening his press release with
familiar negatory quotes from Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ (1853)
and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967): ‘”No” is, generally speaking,
a better answer than “Yes”.’ Hollow metal frames, empty cardboard boxes and
illegible images in a slick palette of black, white, and grey, Faldbakken’s stance
is one of tempered refusal, a game of half-hints filled with mute and resilient
objects that dare us to try and pick at their slick surfaces. The accumulative effect
is like walking through a foreboding, ruined pedestrian underpass, his work
creating a setting usually with the sense of some violence having taken place in
the near past, with the blood and graffiti, for the most part, scrubbed away.
Matias Faldbakken, SHALL I WRITE IT, installation view
Chris Fite-Wassilak 