Untitled (Folders) 2018 -
Text excerpt from Attention Spans, a reader by Garrett Stewart, 2024. From the chapter Material Transference and Medial Merger Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art (2017) Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
“(...) In a revealing medial contrast - by an artist born a decade after Lund and working at the other end of the history of modern technological media - one comes upon, in a meticulous black-and-white treatment, a dramatic mountain landscape by Andreas Albrectsen (b. 1986). Designated Untitled (Folders), this work from 2018 is executed expertly in a charcoal coverage that at the same time seems to have scattered across its “spoiled” surface the smallish all-white (or say simply blank) silhouettes of skeuomorphic file folders in the form of computer icons, their telltale leftmost tabs a titular giveaway. What we have, then, here reverse-engineered to an earlier mode of the pictorial sublime, is a mock-heroic landscape in one of its last vestigial kitsch manifestations. Reproduced in outsize artisanal form, we realize, is the screenshot of a showy desktop image rendered at a dozen times the normal computer scale, complete with its superimposed ( in fact materially underlying) image of clutter. Not unrelated to the photorealism of Sickert when draining the garish palette of colorized lobby cards back in closer approximation to the chiaroscuro of their black-and-white screen originals, the graphite mountainscape Untitled (Folders) seems indicated as sans title, in part at least, for the blank anonymity of the on-screen files. Albrectsen’s display piece has prosecuted its ultimate transmedium irony - beyond the many mountainous rock faces understood as part of a mere interface - when we recognize that, in context, the richly realized slopes, crags, and pinnacles would in themselves constitute, synecdochically, only one (currently uploaded) picture among the many pictured text or image files whose promised searchability punctuate ( perforate) its surface. In this case, however, such unclickable blank icons link only to the sheer platform exposure (in an almost touching belatedness) of an underlying drawing material, a paper materiality, instead of the represented trove of pixel data. “
'Untitled (Folders VII)' 2023. Dry Pastels & charcoal on paper. 144,5 x 220,5 cm
'Untitled (Folders VI)' 2023. Dry Pastels on paper. 141 x 216 cm
'Untitled (Folders V)' 2022. Dry pastels on paper, 141 x 216,5 cm.
'Untitled (Folders IV)' 2022. Dry pastels on paper, 141 x 218 cm.
'Untitled (-)' 2022. Dry pastels on paper, 141 x 218 cm.
Untitled ( Poof) 2022. Dry pastels on paper. 141 x 218 cm
'Untitled ( Dynamic Desert II)' 2020. Charcoal & dry pastels on paper. 140 x 232 cm
'Untitled ( Dynamic Desert)' 2020. Charcoal on paper, 140 x 232 cm
'Untitled (Folders III)' 2019. Charcoal on paper, 140 x 232 cm.
'Untitled (Folders II)' 2019. Charcoal on paper, 140 x 232 cm.
'Untitled (Folders)' 2018. Charcoal on paper, 140 x 232 cm.
(Detail) 'Untitled (Folders)' 2018. Charcoal on paper, 140 x 232 cm.
(Detail) 'Untitled (Folders II)' 2019. Charcoal on paper, 140 x 232 cm.
(Detail) 'Untitled (Folders V)' 2022. Dry pastels on paper, 141 x 216,5 cm.
(Detail) 'Untitled (Folders V)' 2022. Dry pastels on paper, 141 x 216,5 cm.
Installation view 'Edstranska Foundation Awards' 2019. Malmö Art Academy. Photo: Youngjae Lih
Installation view 'Superbloom' Galeria Anita Schwartz, Rio de Janeiro. 2022. Photo: Gabi Carrera.
Installation view 'Superbloom' Galeria Anita Schwartz, Rio de Janeiro. 2022. Photo: Gabi Carrera.
Installation view 'Stationary' Arnstedt, Östra Karup, Sweden. 2020. Photo: Martin Brink.
Installation View, Market Art Fair, 2023. With C.C.C., Jens Huls Funder, Eau Pernice.
Installation View, Chart Art Fair, 2022. With C.C.C. Lulu Refn. Photo: Brian Kure