Matias Faldbakken at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York February 21 – March 30
Take me to your internet. You’ll find it on a quiet Chelsea street, in a locked ground-level gallery. The room is empty save for a line of large text that reads – you guessed it – THE INTERNET. The fabric of the building becomes both monitor and browser window. The bold sans-serif font dials up the post-internet eyeroll quotient. It’s an effect softened only by the work’s suitably millenarian date, 1999. Upstairs, Matias Faldbakken presents several more intimated screens from his “Layered Screens” series, interspersed with works from his “Fuel Sculptures” series (cast concrete jerrycans, pastel painted funnels). Found images of hares, Snow White, a city vista, and book covers cascade like a solitaire endgame inside blank white screens – or are they webpages? They are printed on fading newsprint to further blur the line between page and screen. Here too, the work feels remarkably insincere but is nonetheless attractive, like public art at an airport terminal or some other sprawling paean to contemporaneity. Their banality is pitch-perfect, like a cocktail judiciously iced to become watered down just-so. Some of the book covers have been altered, as with an image of the Marquis de Sade’s Les 120 journées de Sodome, where a wittily placed 50 eurocent coin extends the orgy to 500 days. Others, like one featuring a vintagey man holding a surfboard and the title “The Errand” against a fetching red background, don’t seem to actually exist, like so many ebooks or free online PDF scams – or vaporware, since we’re on this retro-nostalgic 90s trip. It’s hard not to think of Georges Bataille here, writing in The Solar Anus that “Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator.” We might add that pixels are the parody of paper, except here there’s not a dearth of interpretation so much as a dizzying surfeit. We have fuel, we have paper: is the ebook the kindling? There’s a pleasing recursion to it all, too. The mise en abyme effect extends to the cheap stackable furniture that holds up some of these screens. Nesting tables, perhaps, or a trio of yellow and beige plastic stepstools. In other works, the hardware is rather more literal metal assemblages like a rusty meat grinder in Meat Grinder Screen (0 Days of Sodom) (2016) or rudimentary steel hangers holding up denim jackets. We might call them screen-printed – the show is chock full of such visual puns. It’s all so clever and so boring.