Marie Søndergaard Lolk
FOLIAGE
02 Mar – 14 Apr 2018
In Marie Søndergaard Lolk’s solo exhibition the trace of the hand becomes a motif in itself. The works, all of which are made on foamboard and painted with marker and spray paint, draw on a generic aesthetic and operate on a concise, conceptual level leaving the logics of language dissolved and overruled by other agendas. Conditioned by the materials and the work process, FOLIAGE expands and reproduces, like an autonomous culture, distorting the classifications of language and figuration.
The images multiply and loop through digitally generated stencils, projections, and various types of printing processes. They are upscaled or downscaled to the size of a scribble, making some of the works seem more like models or diagrams. As if in an autonomous algorithmic biotope, motifs generate and consume each other’s shapes, giving the works a distinctive digital touch about them.
The works make you think of office whiteboards where spontaneous thoughts are quickly written down and equally quickly erased again, in order to make room for new ideas and notes. The arbitrary note-formations blend with diagrams, pictograms and shapes that come across more or less evaporated. At first glance, the images appear recognizable but the word fragments and pictograms are distorted so that the meaning you just thought you had a grip on, vanishes. On some of the foamboards, the glue layer – otherwise hidden under a protective foil – is exposed, causing dust and dirt from the surrounding environment to stick to them, forming tiny, random formations on the surface of the works. The same foil is used as a print plate to press a motif on to the foam board. The motifs consist of fragments of handwriting and found texts and images – all of which have been filtered through various matrices and detours in the transfer on to the foamboard. Techniques that stretch the works between something humoristic, something generic and a vibrating, tactile presence that all together never quite adds up.