Tobias Hansen
JUN 23
Alternate Work Pattern, Association of Writers & Writing Program, Art World Professional, Average Wholesale Price, Advanced Web Proxy, et cetera.
Most Significant Word, Maximum Shipping Weight , Multiple Stop-And-Wait, My Secret World, Machined Side Wall, et cetera.
Posted without Comment, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Parent with Care, Proceed with Caution, Professionals in Workers’ Compensation, et cetera.
Rating Work File, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Random Wrestling Federation, Rural Workers Fellowship, et cetera.
Between the Words, By the Way, Below the Water, Best to Worst, Bring the Wine, et cetera.
To be in the know of abbreviations emerges from recurrence. They have been found, stolen and created, and they function as asterisks. These asterisks, akin to acronyms, akin to footnotes, serve as expansions that assert their validity through what will be stated as it-is-so, with their elusive meanings, they aim to foster a shared imagination rather than conceal information. This shared imagination is mostly based in the past and asks how the viewer reads the identifiable compared to that of the abstract. If to insist on engaging with the elusive, and with the feeling that the act of allusion has replaced the act of expression in art, then it becomes a question of what that means today. Abbreviations do not point to a singular language, but are malleable and can be manipulated in any way; transferring images, text and meaning. The text, with circulation at the crux, becomes a form that is totally porous.
The literal delimits the figurative. Figurative (i.e.,through resemblances and reflections; in short, the representation of the human body as we experience it perceptually in the material world). However, the figure can also appear more allusively as the figural, shifting away from resemblance and reflection toward the realm of concepts and forms. Form, here, does not refer to the material sense per se but more to a pure ideational space.
Figuration begins and holds through language - a language that finds its most powerful subject in the image. Which is the matter, literally, in figurative language: the ways in which bodies that are very much alive are held in inactivity and apart, in a fictitious place of language circumscribed by images.
If to distinguish what we call formalism to that to formalize; with this is meant, formalism, emphasizes the intrinsic visual elements of a work, independent of external factors, focusing on composition, color, shape, and other formal qualities. In contrast, formalize refers to the act of giving structure or organization, establishing rules or frameworks to guide creation and interpretation. Formalism centers on the work itself, while to formalize involves implementing formal structures to guide processes.
The beauty of proportion in the rectangle is measured by feeling for fine relations, not by any formula whatever, as is the room. And it-is-this composition between rectangle and space that negotiates what relates to what. And, like any form of art, style is, for both maker and viewer, a way of paying attention.
After all this, there is that, there has been that that there, is a composition and that nothing changes except composition the composition and the time of and the time in the composition.
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Works on view, clockwise: line fig. 3, 2023; AWP, 2023; line, 2023; Mood Box, 2023; PWC, 2023; lines fig. 6, 2023; MSW, 2023; line fig. 23, 2023; RWF, 2023; notan, 2023; color, 2023; BTW, 2023. (all 2023)
Dye sublimation on polyester, applied text, gifted object, found object, bought object, stolen letters, bought letters.