New Pictures From Milano Centrale

Presentation of new works by Jesper List Thomsen.

"It is this life, found in the interstices and crevices of a visually oppressive edifice, that List Thomsen’s works reveal. These are documentary pictures. They are structures, paintings, images and constructions, for sure. But they are pictures. A conundrum lies at the heart of the work that provides the impulse of these pictures. In an age so saturated by images that dominate the comprehension of your own life, how can other images that aim to reveal such an experience be captured? How to make pictures of places when places have been reduced to images? So often resistance demands declaration. To declare that an image reveals a truth or a departure from its dominant infrastructure leaves it open to be absorbed by the very structure it aims to critique. It is absorbed into the currency of power. List Thomsen’s pictures are immune to declaration and prescription because they are not images as such. They think more discrepantly, fictionally, slyly. They meet one infrastructure with an alternative one. They capture the disposition of a place as image rather than stand against it. In List Thomsen’s repeated journeys to Milano Centrale, he would write. He would internally absorb the infrastructures that stratify his experience. This language, internalised in the body, would harbour the marks and impact of the place. Not an image per se, but a place, leaving its mark on and in the body, later imparted onto a set of materials to make pictures. Exposed frames, heavily worked surfaces, alongside photographs and sculptures that contain a trace; of language, the body, the hand, the experience. Not a translation but a transferal of bodily data".

Except from exhibition text by Lynton Talbot