Ever since he stepped onto the international art scene with a solo show at Richard Heller gallery in 2016, we've been closely keeping an eye on the works of Joakim Ojanen and enjoying the development of his concepts and the diverse sprouting of his practice. And two years since his solo debut with The Hole, the Swedish artist is back in NYC with another elaborate presentation comprising installation, ceramics, bronze, charcoal drawings, and oil paintings, which arrived directly from his recent presentation at Västerås Konstmuseum in Sweden.
From the moment we first laid our eyes on his droopy characters and their passiveness, it was hard to not fall in love over and over again with this playful yet downcast gang and the scenes that capture their fantastically mundane lives. Through his work, regardless of the form and technique, Ojanen has the special power to find a pleasurable edge of unexciting moments and almost bask in the weirdness or even sadness of life's most blandest moments. His loitering heroes are often captured in some form of interaction, unnaturally bending, elongating, and modifying to the occasion, but rarely showing any signs of recognizable pleasure. Yet, with the mixture of indifferent facial expressions, otherworldly flexible and resistant bodies, and the overall ambience suggested through their surroundings, clothes, or the general color scheme, we almost feel jealous of all the non-fun they're having.
For The Part You Throw Away, Ojanen created his arguably "most emotionally considerate, technically masterful and graphically outlandish works to date." All stemming from his genuine love for childhood drawing and the urgency to create without preconceptions, it's important for the artist to capture his process in each of the work presented. Whether it's the elaborate charcoal drawings and the intricate and persistent mark making, colorful and texture-rich oils, or fantastically playful ceramics and bronzes in which the artist breaks the smooth surface with purposely left finger print marks. Both conveying the playful approach to creative process and revealing the traces of improvisation and experimentation, his oddball characters and the puzzling scenes keep evolving into the impossible sphere, staying firmly connected with the untamable, child-like imagination. The idea of utilising the form and the surface as the primary elements of his work culminates in large bronze pieces in which the surface blandness and the lack of color provide more archetypal appearance. On one hand, using the scale to capture the attention, Ojanen is providing less details and additional elements allowing for the viewer to part take in the scene and envision their own ambience around it. —Sasha Bogojev