Installations vy. Stol och skulptur i trä.
Mats Adelman
11.18.08
ARTFORUM
AUTHOR: JOANNA FIDUCCIA
10.31.08-11.29.08 ELASTIC
Mats Adelman’s drawings are reminders that weirdos make art, too—in this case, the kind inspired by Black Sabbath lyrics and elaborately illustrated on the reverse side of class notes. Yet Adelman’s work is far more ambiguous than his backwoods aesthetic might suggest: as indebted to the imagination’s lofty reaches as to its lower fixations. In his current show, the young Swedish artist presents sculptures and a pair of films alongside landscapes befitting horror movies and antisocial adolescent fantasies—two settings that self-consciously find their high-culture likenesses in the avant-garde’s gothic drift and art’s long tradition of tortured genius. Quaintly rendered in graphite, ink, and watercolor, the vistas include condemned shacks and desolate cabin grounds (potential homes for the sculptures: a birdhouse made from shards of wood, and a birch chair crowned by three carved owls). But if Adelman’s works on paper suggest the arcane labors of a misanthrope, the artist’s films achieve a sinister charm with deeper aesthetic registers. Filmed on Super-8, they record the menace of rural and industrial borderlands with lush long takes fit for art-house cinema and with gruesome, climactic Hollywood scenes. The settings seem to belong to horror films dimly recollected and scrubbed of their gore. En skruv i en mekanism som inte vrider någon annan del av mekanism (A screw is a mechanism that doesn’t turn any other part of the mechanism), 2008, features a flock of mechanical birds and a Tarkovskian technique wherein the text (here, subtitles providing scientific translations of paranormal phenomena) is dislocated from the imagery. In one shot, a man walks backward along a path in the woods—a simple method of distortion that, like Adelman’s own ambivalent backwardness, makes all the difference between the merely spooky and the deeply unsettling.
