Alexander Tovborg´s (b.1983) works give a panoptic view of topical an virtual spaces. Through broken perspectives, manifold ideas and repeated reconstructions, his drawings unfold as sculptural fragments of stories. Tiny bits of stories stimulate larger, bur distanced scenarios. The many blank fields in Tovborg’s images are like undone thoughts that, through his underplayed teasing, function as epilogues to stories with ironic seriousness. An entire gallery of epic figures participate side-by-side with cultural symbols: priests, giants and pilgrims present themselves among churches, castles, cemeteries and special divinities. Holes and wells appear as judgment day allegories, and the lonely cowboy is replaced by a group of suffering people. Equivocal actions are visualized in a sort of frozen glimpse. Tovborg’s cogent imaginations especially focus on ceremonial events, where people are faced with fear, suffering and religious comfort.
Both drawing and sculpture hint at a play with time and space. Present time seems to be on th verge of disaperance, while the future is just about to appear. The fusion of past and future in the present is a recurrent marker of both form and content in Tovborg’s works, and the materials and their shapely collisions are imbued with anachronisms. Thus, mahogany-laminate is mixed with cheap wood; a paper full of holes in plastic is covered in pen drawings and ceramic sculptures are mixed with their original clay-forms. In general, the works seem to expose themselves. The creation process is an intregrated part of the aesthetic, and as the sculptural shape is examined, the functionality is amputated. It thus becomes possible to understand how a mini golf course can be submitted to fantasies about death: as it closes in on itself as a grave, its sports-like function is ironically made superfluous, and its decay becomes a poetical statement. In the same way, space is scanned in minute drawings made of tape, which contain a self-destructive fragilness and grace. Tovborg draws on art historical references without reproducing them as hollow forms. He specially distils the decadent artistic language of the Baroque into his random aesthetic that controls his thematical frame which circle round illusionism and serious voyeurism.
Tovborg’s space can be read as subjective feelings that been transformed into general states of mind. Instead of pointing to an individual narrator, it is the fictive society or the epochs in time that play the main parts. Thus, the identifications is removed and perhaps the distance makes a critical freedom possible. Tovborg constructs a complex observatory that mirrors its own reflection, thus disrupting a clear and concise perception. The scenario contains a burlesque and melancholy impossibility that can remind you of the absurd pleasure you meet in the works of Samuel Beckett and which becomes part of a tale about the backsides of society.
Alexander Tovborg is still a student at the Royal Danish Art Academy, but has already made him noticed in the exhibition scene at several occasions, i.e. through the convincing solo show “I tell you weird tales” at the gallery Bendixen Contemporary.
All the works are from 2007…his is the best!!
See you soon my good boy…