Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present Abstracts and Pewter Abstracts, its third solo exhibition by the Oslo-based artist and author Matias Faldbakken.

All the works in this show are drawings: on paper, on canvas, and with pewter. And they are all abstract. I’ve written some sentences to clarify “drawing” and “abstract,” but things are not very clear and perhaps there is no other way than to put this in paradoxical terms.

Drawing has a strange essence. A drawing on a white sheet of pricey art paper can diminish the paper’s value; it seems easier to discard a piece of paper stained by a lousy drawing than to throw away the untouched sheet — which is straight up violent. On the other hand, a drawing doesn’t have to be done to be done. Drawing seems thin, slight, and doesn’t have the nasty limitlessness of painting, it doesn’t go as “far”. Most, if not all, drawing gravitates toward the same level of questionable. Drawing is material image-making pitted against all the other images. Let every drawing be a critique of whatever hangs next to it. Drawing embodies the potency slash impotency of images.

On show is my compulsion to draw, drawn, and my reluctance to draw, drawn. Drawing is empathic denial and the way you draw is deeply embarrassing but it’s also yours. You will never draw straight because your hand has a dialect — or is it an accent? The lofty thing about a grown man drawing and the dubious thing about a middle-aged man drawing. A man drawing — an inoperative man.

Drawing might not have much to say about its trauma, the screen, but it’s still an antagonist in a screen climate. Drawing is a technology that hasn’t been updated. Charcoal on paper and ink on paper and pencil on paper has always looked like that. Radical charcoal. Beaten ink. A weakening image machine. Drawing has this troublesome, shallow, slow, scratchy, mute, warm, pale space in it that the screen doesn’t have. Drawing refuses to be fresh. Every pixel wants something from you but paper is not electric, it’s dead. Graphite is dead. Gesso ist tot. Drawing is satisfaction through the use of tools that are least controlled by others. Drawing is the original artistic impulse and the smartest and most clueless move is to go back to that. There’s an old saying among metal heads about heavy metal that I sometimes paraphrase and lend to drawing: drawing is ridiculous but we know that going in.