Originals/Evening Drawings :

Originals/Evening Drawings
LMNO, Brussels, April 20 - June 6, 2023

With this exhibition, LMNO Brussels is pleased to present a new collaboration with
Norwegian artist Dag Erik Elgin. Originals (Grisaille)/Evening
Drawings brings two distinct groups of work by Dag Erik Elgin into dialogue.
The series Originals consist of re-painted renditions of iconic modernist
paintings, subsequently repeated as Grisailles, grey-tone copies of the
Originals. Echoes of the echo, so to speak.
The Evening Drawings (1996-2023) on the other hand, are sober line
drawings of domestic surroundings that, unlike the Originals, were created
within the artist's own home and, as the title suggests, outside office (or
studio) hours.

As such, the Originals and their Grisaille counterparts can be said to be
"official" copies acknowledging the word’s shared etymology with "office," a
compound of the Latin opus and facere: "to do" and "to work", produced in
the place of artistic work, the studio. The Evening Drawings, on the other
hand, blur the distinction between the productive space of the studio and
traditionally unproductive space of the home, revealing perhaps the artist as
the exemplary worker in an increasingly speculative economy in which every
site has the potential to «do work» – i.e. to become official. Their
happenstance likeness to the snapshots one might find posted on Instagram
seem to speak to this very point (Elgin has played on this ambiguity by, for
100 uninterrupted days, publishing one of the drawings onto his Instagram
profile), although it should be mentioned that the series was conceived long
before the technosphere’s wholesale erosion of the boundaries between the
official and the private, and between work and the social.

Rather than simply identifying with this indistinction, however, Elgin's works
confound all notions of even speculative productivity by remaining in the
artist's private collection rather than being offered for sale. Is time spent in
the studio productive if the objects produced there are refused exchange
value? Only the Grisailles – the echoes of the echo – and the works created
outside the productive frame of the studio, the Evening Drawings, enter into
market circulation.

Different modes of production aside, Elgin’s two series both attest to similar
modes of perception. Brought together, no distinction is made between an
electrical socket or a painting by Picasso, sorting the clutter of everyday life
and iconic paintings into the same visual index. At first glance, Elgin’s work
in the laborious sense presents itself as a kind of enumeration of the visible,
disinterested and mechanical in its indiscriminate indexing, reflecting the
only possibility afforded by a postmodern condition where, according to
Frederic Jameson, «all that is left is to itemise the events of our daily life, to
list the items that come by.»

Yet Elgin’s Originals are no carbon copies, and anyone familiar with the
works of Picasso would immediately recognise Originals (Picasso Guéridon)
for what it is; a peculiar reenactment. Their visual cipher is not the trompel'oeil
or the forgery. Nor are the Originals still lives, as it would be
unconceivable to find the painted shadow of an impasto in Elgin's motives.
Rather, they are generative maps through which the artist explores the
counterfactualities or, as one might call them, the impotentialities of the
repeated originals; made possible by re-performing the original paintings as
if they were scores of music.

And shadows are precisely those which are absent in the line-rendered
domestic sphere of the Evening Drawings, unveiling them, like the Originals,
to be cartographic explorations, not of the internality of modernist
masterpieces, but the hallucinatory fluidity between home and studio, work
and play.

Originals / La Collection Moderne: LMNO, Brussels 2023

La Collection Moderne (Magritte): LMNO, Brussels 2023

Originals / La Collection Moderne: LMNO, Brussels 2023

Evening Drawings: LMNO, Brussels 2023