”When I was nine years old, the world, too, was nine years old. At least, there was no difference between us, no opposition, no distance. We just tumbled around from sunrise to sunset, earth and body as alike as two pennies. And there was never a harsh word between us, for the simple reason that there were no words at all between us; we never uttered a word to each other, the world and I.

Our relationship was beyond language—and thus also beyond time. We were one big space (which was, of course, a very small space).

And right at that point in time (where there were no points in time), our school began teaching us about all the world’s points in time.

When I turned ten years old, the world suddenly turned ten million billion years old.”

InCOMFORT 732/00/ Elisabeth Molin addresses entropy – the ‘perfect disorder’ or ‘randomness of an enclosed system’ – resulting from a curiosity of how architecture and urban artifacts affect the human body. Her work intertwines photography and short poetic texts, together creating a prism of approaches to the subject. Whereas the photographs visually refer to moments of intersection, the text describes bodily encounters with synthetic materials, screens and data.

Molin’s works act as a series of chance encounters; the motifs in her images are never staged, but always found and shot as they are. They point at the microscopically small, the day to day transformations and to a between state-ness. As opposed to separating the natural from the artificial, the photographs depict the often surreal and magical encounters between mechanical and organic rhythms in the city.

The titleCOMFORT 732/00/ refers to a note she found on the street one day, which she was intrigued by but couldn’t decipher; it seemed to contain a paradox between a state of mind and a particular time, although the time was out of date, an imagined date almost, caught in between past, present and future.

“If our space, our world, hadn’t acquired time, it had certainly acquired depth. And it had definitely been stirred up.”

The difficulties of grasping things that exist outside “our” time and through “our” language have often lead artists to an in-depth examination of the materiality of things. Attempting to understand the function and meaning of the (sometimes invisible) materials we surround ourselves with, we see in the works of Kristian Kragelund a carefully organized, controlled and rigorous process of layering fiberglass on top of canvas, only to let it react and respond to his gestures underneath, allowing the coincidences to arise.

If we step close to the portrait-sized works, we get a glimpse of the human touch from the artist, who is leaving his mark on the canvas with intuitive strokes however affected by his inherent knowledge of how he’s part of a greater system. The connected diagonal lines bring to mind the schematics of a computational code, like the visual manifestation of an algorithm, perhaps similar to the one that created the pattern of the fiberglass, determined on maximal strength and capacity. The process of layering resembles the tension between nature and technology, from the biologic – the artist himself – imitating the artificial intelligence – the algorithm – to the computer-generated fiberglass, which mimics the flexibility of organic tissue or skin. The meeting of drawing and canvas accidentally reveals a pattern “simulating” nature enhanced by the appearance of the air bubbles in between creating a silk like surface, and fusing man and machine in a process of what the artist thinks of as moral collapse in society.

“The whole surface of the Earth should be covered by sensors placed with half a meter’s space in-between, capable of gathering data that would then be compiled into a huge computer. But almost in the same moment that the computer would start its calculations, there would, in the interstices between the sensors, appear very small deviations that at first would result in very small mis-calculations in the computer, mistakes that nevertheless would spread and grow rapidly and finally become worldwide.”

“The small interstices between our senses, in-between awareness and unawareness, in-between the spaces, in-between the words.”

Suggesting the interstice as an amorph place of becoming, brings us to the fourth artist of the exhibitionLe Hasard et la Nécessité Nathan Peter. With his twofold approach Peter makes use of his art historical knowledge as points of reference, here especially finding inspiration in the Baroque theatrical world of illusions, by working with elements as the fold and the mirror. With these ideas in mind he examines the materiality of painterly resources such as color and canvas. The result becomes what he terms a “negative” painting, an upside down, crumbled up, folded and unfolded sculptural object unraveled and somehow disassembled in his laborious studio performance as a way of distilling physical as well as philosophical information on “painting” into its very essence.

In terms of chance and necessity, Peter says that he likes the possibility of something expanding infinitely – like the fold: “In its movements exists endless opportunities of pulling apart, putting back together, over and over again. Visually, you kind of want to fold it back up, but because of the missing stretcher bars, which would constraint the painting physically, there are these infinite chances of allowing the work to grow outside of the frame in a continuous movement.”

“We just know that there is something we call chance. That there is something we perceive as chance. Still, there can be something about this chance that we do not perceive. Chance could even be fulfilled by an order, that streams on different frequencies than the ones our human senses are able to tune in on.”