galleria heino

Axel Antas 26.11.-18.12. 2005

Interventions

Axel Antas (b.1976) was born and raised in Finland but has resided in London since 1997. After studies at the Nordic School of Art in Finland he enrolled in the prestigious Goldsmiths College in London, from which he graduated in 2000. Antas uses videos and photographs as his media. A skilled graphic artist, Antas is known for his delicate grey pencil sketches.

Of the artist's new video works, 'Formations Echoed' is truly a "child of the mist". Across Northern European landscapes shot in England and Denmark, artificial 'clouds' appear, as if by magic, only to disappear minutes later. Antas's pastoral interventions quietly animate the landscapes, rendering them momentarily strange and ethereal, before returning them to tranquil glades. The artist's series of large-scale monochrome photographs, collectively titled 'Whiteout' expand this theme. Long exposures bleach the images of colour so that we are left with pure luminosity and an evocation of the numinous. Each place hovers in and out of focus, preventing us from grasping the spatial order of the scene and rendering it akin to an after-image, or a distant memory which we can only hazily recollect. As the artist notes, "the colour white has a strange effect on us; it works on a physical level, in a different way to darkness but with the same effect."

Antas's Tree Structure -drawings are overwhelmingly physical often to the point of monumentality, and yet ethereal and ephemeral. Floating away from the wall or in white frames, they appear gossamer-light rather than solid objects; moreover, the entire paper surface becomes activated and rather than pulling our eye around the picture surface, so that we are invited to return the most intense and contemplative gaze.

Antas works with tonally close 'figure' and 'ground' elements which allow us to be absorbed slowly and delicately into vast, unmeasurable imaginary spaces. Once immersed in these imaginary places, our eyes are set free to wander and roam. In addition, the combination of encountering an unknowable scenario and Antas ' s subtle range of light grey tones allows each work to entangle a sense of grace and threat: our visual pleasure is offset by consternation. In the artist's 'Tree Structure' drawings, the scenes also resemble the aftermath of an unknown disaster.

Alistair Robinson