Artists

Mickael Marman

Press release

Zug refers to the eponymous Swiss town and canton — also known as the Crypto Valley — renowned for its favourable tax regime and, in recent years, an influx of appallingly wealthy Norwegians looking for somewhere to stash their fortunes.

A simple Google search reveals both the delusions and double standards underwriting this unofficial path to migration. “In Switzerland, Norwegians are the new refugees,” declared a Geneva-based correspondent for Le Monde. What the fuck? Meanwhile, an Oslo-based writer for Fortune and Bloomberg reported that “steep increases in … taxes by Norway’s left-leaning government have prompted dozens of the Nordic nation’s rich to move to another prosperous, mountainous country to the south.” Norway doesn’t even look like Switzerland, I reassure myself, despite having only been to the latter. I know the Alps from the fjords… And yet, in the imaginations of certain financial journalists, the two countries might as well be the same: prosperous, beautiful, and orderly landscapes whose peaks and valleys serve as channels for the uninhibited movement of capital. In this world, not only is it conceivable for a billionaire to be a refugee, but apparently it is aspirational, too.

For the purposes of this exhibition, Marman homes in on the absurd figure of the “tax refugee” — “this is Black humour,” he tells me — as a means of exposing the untold freedoms enjoyed by the European billionaire class. Yet Marman is not painting Norwegians in Switzerland. He is not even painting Switzerland. He is painting Norway’s fantasy of Switzerland. Statistically, the average Norwegian has never been to Zug, and yet Zug has assumed an almost mythological status within Norwegian public discourse. In Marman’s hands, Zug becomes the Crypto-El Dorado: a destination encountered less through travel than through newspaper headlines, political rhetoric, and fantasies of economic escape. This distance is where the work resides.

Crucially, the Zug paintings resist straightforward interpretation as landscapes. Produced from Marman’s imagination, rather than en plein air — his studio is in Oslo and offers no such view from which these scenes might be derived; indeed, it offers no view at all, a fact the artist laments — the works exaggerate the way a Norwegian expatriate might picture the Swiss countryside. Rather than depicting a place, they visualise a territory defined less by geography than by class anxieties.

Created using fabric dyes, the surfaces of these works will continue to bleed gently over time, a self-destructive side effect of the process that Marman embraces. Shifting from murky green tones to bruised purples, fleshy pinks, and acidic yellows, the works are somewhere between psychedelic caricature and an interpretation of Romantic landscape painting. Mountains? Skies? Maybe … plants? Nothing is identifiable. Everything is absurd. Installed amidst pedestals decoupaged with financial newspapers and bearing titles derived from the initials of prominent Norwegian billionaires, the Zug paintings bind questions of capital, geography, and imagination into a deliberately unstable pictorial field.

Like the compressed, psychological landscapes of Etel Adnan, Marman’s works are less concerned with describing a place than examining the desires projected onto it. Within the cryptoglobalist imaginary, Norway and Switzerland have become interchangeable: two affluent mountain landscapes joined by the frictionless flow of capital. The Alps and the fjords begin to resemble one another not because they are alike, but because both have been transformed into green screens for economic fantasies. If landscape painting has historically naturalised claims to territory, belonging, and ownership, Marman’s unstable, bleeding surfaces reveal the fragility of the fantasies projected onto them.

— Olamiju Fajemisin