Mikael Lo Presti: Greetings from the Whereabouts [signed]

Works and installations views: The first monograph on the Swedish painter Mikael Lo Presti and surveys his work for the past 6 years . Impressive! From the publisher: "Greetings from ...": the words spelled across the painting are in a style of handwriting that is not really anybody's handwriting. Rather it is in the style we can collectively agree on having the look of handwriting. The precision and eerie elegance, makes it less the traits of a particular personality and more traces of a careful construction. The letters – coming across as an amalgam of what is real, what is unreal and what is hyperreal – can be seen weaving in between images of a fying angle, of an erupting volcano, and of postcards scattered across the picture plane. Each one of these are painted as bold shapes that are either appearing in profle or facing forward. They leave one with the sensation of viewing the painting through a stereoscope – those red and blue glasses that would convert an image from 2D to 3D – where the precisely spaced out layers are doing their very best to provide a sense of spatial depth, but instead result in an oscillating or collapsing of space. Similar to how Belgian fashion designer Martin Margiela's "Flat Collection" (1998) made the wardrobe of a paper doll its starting point – forcing two-dimensional garments onto the three-dimensional bodies of his catwalk models – layers of different realities are here pressed upon each other. In Lo Presti's paintings these are not only the layers building up a pictorial space, but also the layers that are making up a place. This is Sicily, the birthplace of his father and the place where he spent numerous summers growing up. This is a place where facts, myths and expectations are interwoven to make up the understanding of it. It is where a Caravaggio on the run meets a Caravaggio painting stolen by the mafa, meets the Godfather, meets caponata and granita, meets the subdued hues of the mosaics of Villa Romana del Casale and the pink jersey of the relegated and disgraced Palermo FC, meets the vista of Mount Etna, the world's most active volcano, erupting and shaping the very symbol of life in Sicily – a forced acceptance of the unstable, the unruly and the unreliable. - Excerpt from Eivind Furnesvik: "Wish You Were Here (But Also Wish I Was Elsewhere)! - On the paintings of Mikael Lo Presti" Mikael Lo Presti (b. 1989, Södra Sandby, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm. He is a graduate of the Art Academy in Oslo and a previous participant of the Maumaus Independent Study Programme in Lisbon, Portugal. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition, “A tree that will not rot”, at Frankfurt am Main in Berlin, as well a solo presentation at “Market – The Nordic Art Fair” in Stockholm under the auspices of STANDARD (OSLO). Other recent exhibitions include Condo, Bureau, New York, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way”, STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo, “Tegnebiennalen” at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, and “Maleriets Letthet” at Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo. Coinciding with this exhibition, STANDARD (BOOKS) will publish Mikael Lo Presti's frst monograph with texts by Eivind Furnesvik, Johannes Witkowsky and Emma Aars.