It is with great excitement that BGE Contemporary Art Projects announce our third new solo exhibition ”Vekten av ingenting” by Christer Glein.
The paintings displayed in Vekten av ingenting show layers of textured geometric shapes. Separated by colour, they fill the surfaces of the canvas in a seamless way, creating an organic and natural expression. The paintings are a continuation of the artist’s ongoing project that seeks to explore the possibilities of painting, both with experimental use of colour, technique and challenges of different genres within painting. No colour is alone on the canvas, but applied in layers on layers between monochrome substrates and pointelistic coats of different colours. Glein’s carefully planned coloristic palette is used to create surfaces that move actively forward and inward into the surface. He creates a play of small vibrations in the layers of brush strokes, and a composition that is aimed to guide the eye around the repeating pattern.
The title of the exhibition “Vekten av ingenting” (The Weight of Nothing), refers to Glein´s relationship with the canvas, with himself as a painter, and with painters before him. The safety of his artist studio, and the impact the pandemic has had on him as an artist, in his own words;
To paint is to feel the weight of nothing. The white surface of the canvas, a naked room with the weight of everyone who has walked the path before. Like other painters, I have carried the weight of nothing for many years already, a self-imposed and therefore perhaps abstract weight, a collective challenge one must solve oneself. The days are often marked by repetition, the same path to my artist studio, the same brush against the canvas, the same idea executed in a different way. Habits that provide security and stack the self-image as a scaffolding against the external world. In the last year, however, everything has changed. The world outside the studio has become quiet, the safe habit has turned into emptiness and frustration. We have slowly but surely moved towards stagnation and collapse, we all carry the weight of nothing.
In exploring the possibilities of the abstract painting, Glein separates between two different techniques. On one hand, one can recognize the loose and rough brushstrokes of expressionism and on the other hand, the abstraction of Supremacism, which is characterized by its sharp edges. The formal elements are precise and exact, placed within the abstract universe of different elements. As he combines different associative material into one canvas from different traditions in art, one can analyze his paintings in an echo of poststructuralist thinking response to structuralism.