FREDRIK VÆRSLEV

In his text accompanying the exhibition, Dieter Roelstraete writes: “Fredrik Værslev’s latest body of work consists of large strips of painted cotton (i.e., canvas) arranged and displayed as sets of curtains.

__On the basic level of biography, these works reference one of the artist’s oldest aesthetic experiences: a primal, prelingual sense that his mother’s choice of bright colours and brash patterns for covering up his childhood home’s windows had something deliberately ‘artful’ about it. On the slightly more elevated level of the artist’s continuing interrogation of the codes and conventions that constitute the expanded field of painting, Vaerslev’s curtain paintings seem to question the age-old metaphor of painting as a window onto the world – any window, any world. Perhaps painting is the curtain designed to sabotage this epochal dream of total transparency instead?

And on the Olympian level of founding myths and memes, finally, the legend of the fifth-century Greek painter Zeuxis as recounted in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History comes to mind: ‘The contemporaries and rivals of Zeuxis were Timanthes, Androcydes, Eupompus, and Parrhasius. This last, it is said, entered into a pictorial contest with Zeuxis, who represented some grapes, painted so naturally that the birds flew towards the spot where the picture was exhibited. Parrhasius, on the other hand, exhibited a curtain, drawn with such singular truthfulness, that Zeuxis, elated with the judgment which had been passed upon his work by the birds, haughtily demanded that the curtain should be drawn aside to let the picture be seen. Upon finding his mistake, with a great degree of ingenuous candour he admitted that he had been surpassed, for that whereas he himself had only deceived the birds, Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist.’

And so the story of art begins – by way of subterfuge: ‘nothing to see here’.”