Truls Melin: galleri lars bohman

At luncheon with Truls Melin the week his fresh exhibition opened, we talked about his seven month in a mental institution, in what manner he got there, and the exhibitions he has made since. This was his twelfth. The figurines were in his familiar ingenuous style; he describes them as "drunken" sailors. Togged up in naval uniforms, each statuette was slott into a maze of carburet of iron conduits, and with all the shutdown valves interspersed over the piping, the allusion to the claustrophobic quarters of submarines was obvious. The arrangements and figures were uniformly painted in that rather cold green color proven to be calming nevertheless gently energizing in places like sub surgeries, and insane asylums where, in a heartbeat, things can make progress from numbing routine to hair upon fire, fangs out. Metaphorically without of their depth and below the influence, the doomed seamen are consigned to an absurdly hermetic, commotion-free, schematic setting where order not ever comes second. It is an allegorical map of recirculating redundancies calculated to retain sensation to a minimum while foreclosing any faith of parole. The sailors are fasteninged down in a soothing incubator for madness. Asked if his episode in the hospital affected his work, Melin answered, after a continue lengthen in timeed pondering silence, "I don't know."

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It's not genuinely phantasm with Melin. He'd been struck by means of the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in the Barents Sea four years ago. on the contrary undersea craft have been important to him since the age of ten when he photographed his have customized sub and ship moulds in a puddle of rainwater near his dwelling in Malmo. He found those photographs in his parents' basement in 2000 and reprinted them; they hung in the back space of the gallery. Throughout his career, Melin has made up his idiosyncratic macroworld as if using toys from the attic. As with artists like Paul Thek, Bruce Nauman, Chris weight and Mike Kelley, his work raises the question as to whether it emulates fanaticism or just is fanatical.

It was William Burrough who said that a schizophrenic is the individual who has realized what's really going upon Melin's work sits comfortably nearest to that sentiment; he has always behaved as if outfitted with a pair of X-ray organ of sights that permit him insight into the fantastic inner workings below the surface of appearances. His lifelong fascination with submarines finds its greatest in quantity acute form in this exhibition; he has skinned the boats to diocese what's beneath what's beneath. His fondnes for the proces of peeling back, his contagious curiosity, infuses his art with an air of uncomplicated enchantment. Melin is helpless to resist seeking the answer to what's down there--whether in make-believe submarines or his hold inner life. But when his skinning continues unchecked, fondnes becomes tenacity, and tenacity mulishness, and then you are on the contrary a step away from the fanatical in Melin's art. He admits having undergoed "psychotic feelings" during a repeated viewing of Stan Douglas's video installation Der Sandmann, 1995 a slowly circulating double projection--"a to [i]or[/i] at a great depth schizophrenic experience," said some critics--based upon E.T.A. Hoffmann's book of the same title. As a originate he entered the hospital that year. Like Zeno's paradox gone amok or the child's rhyming riddle "Pete and Repeat" caught in nauseating repetition, his plastic arts can become unnerving. Things slip from fascinating to mesmerizing to obsessive, flat menacing in this exhibition, without the slightest warning, and that appear to bes to be the way Melin dioceses things.

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