KRISTIAN TOUBORG + FLORENCE GIROUX GRAVEL

MERGING ECHOES

OPENING FRIDAY, 11.03.23 | 6PM – 8PM

NOVEMBER 3 - EXTENDED, BY APPT. UNTIL JANUARY 13, 2024

CARVALHO PARK announces the opening of its new gallery space, extending its exhibition galleries into the adjacent building at 110 Waterbury Street in Brooklyn. The inaugural show, Merging Echoes, features a suite of works by Copenhagen-based, multimedia artist Kristian Touborg – who shows for the third time with the gallery – surrounding a glass sculpture diptych by Quebec City-based artist, Florence Giroux Gravel. The exhibition marks an exciting moment of expansion for CARVALHO PARK on the cusp of its five-year anniversary. Merging Echoes opens the evening of Friday, November 3, from 6 – 8, and is extended through January 6, 2024.

The European Impressionists held that to truly reflect the workings of human perception, painting must forsake the inert, coherent image favored by the most celebrated artists from the Renaissance onwards. Light moves and organic matter responds, they contended, facts that traditional figurative representation refused. Yet vision is rarely one-dimensional, nor is sight experienced to the exclusion of all other senses. Kristian Touborg acknowledges this reality through a translation of perception’s embodied, tactile qualities into paintings, which possess a sculptural heft. Wooden nodes, aluminium bars, and lengths of recycled polyester enclose images, created through a combination of dye sublimation printing and gestural brushwork – a formal heterogeneity that lends his works their singularly substantial presence. These paintings insist on encounter rather than mere observation; they act upon you.

Another Impressionist innovation sought to highlight individual brushstrokes to emphasize the artifice of their chosen mode of expression. By drawing attention in diverse ways to the physicality of the painted surface, Touborg extends this self-consciousness and puts it to more radical ends. Swaths of fabric are carefully hand-sewn together and stretched across metal structures that resemble scaffolds. An allusion to Touborg’s former work as a scaffolder, the foundation of these paintings — which remain visible at the work’s margins and interstices — challenges hierarchical distinctions that insist upon fine art as a medium of transcendence and construction as a show of brute force alone. Touborg’s work encourages us to see all these practices on a single continuum, revealing the rigour and tenderness across all mediums, reliant on the skill and ingenuity of the hand.

The wooden elements of Touborg’s structures, which are attached to stretcher bars and come with various densities and surfaces, evoke a far more distant tradition, that of the medieval altarpiece. In an altarpiece, wooden structures demarcate and suggestively interlink religious tableaus. Altarpieces were the gravitational centers of holy spaces that encouraged devotion, and via the movement of wooden hinges, could be opened and closed to offer more or less access to worshippers. In these works, observance, to mean both religious feeling and the act of seeing, is acknowledged as a physical and spatial phenomenon. Touborg’s secular reimagining of the altarpiece’s trimmings places his work within that lineage, which at its core, centers on fostering emotion and intimacy. In landscapes that are always inhabited as well as seen, Touborg advances a phenomenological approach to painting that reckons with proprioception and affect, as much as the history of representation. 

Boiling Boiling (Heat Sensitive Pond and Time Study) takes a process which eludes the visual — the ineffable workings of vapour, gas, and atmospheric pressure — and transforms it into a tangible, haptic object. Sensation radiates out of blocks in which a fierce, roiling red evocative of heat overpowers a shimmering blue ground. Strips of fabric recall microscopic slides under which the multiplicity of pond life might be viewed, suggesting empirical ambitions akin to a scientific investigation. For Touborg, scale and perspective alike are techniques to be manipulated or made strange, to better serve the information conveyed by the senses. The flattened, aerial perspective of Flyfishing in Flood (A Vulture’s View) contrasts its position of omniscience with the surrender of sight demanded by fishing, in which success manifests as a physical sensation first — the tug of the line.

Reflection of Representation of a Climactic Sound Image proposes the rip or the ripple as a means of picturing sound, mirroring the visual effects of the oscilloscope, an instrument which converts noise into simple graphic marks. In Reflections and Noisy Shadows, the phenomena of visual noise, arresting variations in color and light found in digital mediums, is regarded in parallel to the ordinary drama of atmospheric effects.

Touborg frequently blurs the distinction between the backlit digital displays of new technologies with the reflective surface of a body of water, which gestures to a broader interest in the vehicles and methods of image-making, be they man-made or naturally occurring. In a tripartite structure that references the Renaissance triptych, Green Greeting brings into dialogue different types of image-making from across art’s history. In a scene framed as by a camera-phone, a sprig of foliage rhymes with the colored cap of an adjacent driver, below which an abstract slab of iridescent green might be that sprig seen in close-up; at the bottom a pair of floral motifs, orchid mantises, are seen in bloom. This act of cross-pollination, a possible nod to his mother’s career as a botanist, could also be a metaphor for Touborg’s process, in which everyday ephemera, photographs, sketches, and motifs from pre-existing works are reproduced, recycled, and recombined.

Florence Giroux Gravel’s diptych Light and Transparency shares Touborg’s preoccupation with reflection, to denote both the impressions created by light in motion and the act of contemplation. Large glass cubes that play with the saturation and absorption of light invite the viewer, who might be glimpsed on the structure’s mirrored surface, to immerse themselves within a meditative space. Although architectural in structure, redolent of contemporary urban design, their palette draws on the landscape of the Southwestern desert, the pink, orange and purple of sunsets Gravel witnessed while researching this work. Gravel’s radiant glass panels allude to the sparseness of that landscape while also referencing the optical illusions born out of its unique climatic conditions, with mirrored surfaces which emulate the refraction of light in a mirage. Despite their austere appearance, something of Gravel’s pleasure in nature’s innate displays of beauty remains in the foundations of these sculptures. Through subtle rhythms of luminosity and tone, they embody openness, quiet, stillness; they soothe, they hold. Could light be said to breath and think and dream? The power of Gravel’s sculptures is such that these questions cease to feel whimsical, and become cause to remain a little longer in her work’s orbit.

Like Touborg, Gravel moves seamlessly between the constructed and the natural, proposing a harmony between the human and non-human which has larger political implications. The landscape tradition across the early history of painting kept the artist and viewer at a remove from its subject matter, and reinforced the belief that nature existed merely to be owned, dominated, exploited. Touborg and Gravel, in foregrounding encounter and sensation in works addressed to the natural world’s most remarkable, dynamic visual effect – light – make it impossible to deny our connection to nature, and thus our responsibility to protect it.

Essay by Rebecca Birrell, Leverhulme Trust Fellow at The University of St Andrews and Research Associate at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Kristian Touborg (b.1987 in Roskilde, Denmark) holds a Masters from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Recent exhibitions include Vibrant Escape: Ode to Summer, WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong (2023); Dandelion, Newchild, Antwerp (2023, solo); Fluttering The Void, Berlinskej Model, Prague (2022, solo); Trust in Mortals, Brigade Gallery, Copenhagen (2022); Light Blue Noise, Lundgren Gallery, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (2022, solo); Peripheries, Newchild, Antwerp (2022); Bright Beneath, Eduardo Secci Novo Projects, Milan (2021, solo); As We Turn Fluent, CARVALHO PARK, New York (2021); and Soft, Metal, Factory — HEART Collection, Herning Art Museum, Denmark (2021). The artist presented his first institutional solo exhibition in 2022 at Kunsthal Kongegaarden. His work is included in the permanent collections of HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Randers Kunstmuseum; The Blake Byrne Collection and Statens Kunstfond. Touborg lives and works in Copenhagen.

Florence Giroux Gravel (b. 1990, Montréal, Canada) received her Masters in Fine Arts and Sciences from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, and a Certificate in Studio Art from New York University, New York in 2016. Institutional solo exhibitions include those at Sorbonne Art Gallery, Paris (forthcoming 2024); Galerie AMF, Quebec City (2023); Maison de la Culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Montréal (2022); and Musée Marius-Barbeau, St-Joseph-de-Beauce (2019), as well as solo presentations with Centre Culturel Georges-Vanier, Montréal (2022); Galerie AVE, Montréal (2019) and Maison des Étudiants Canadiens, Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, Paris (2015). In 2021, Giroux Gravel created her first land art work for the 14th edition of Créations-sur-le-champ / Land Art, Mont-Saint-Hilaire. She has participated in residency programs in Iceland, New York, and Montréal. Notable collections include Claridge Inc. Montréal and UBISOFT, Montréal. Giroux Gravel belongs to the Artists File of Art and Architecture Integration Policy of Quebec (1%). The artist lives and works in Quebec City.