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 hold 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.