incense, smoke, perfume, coffee, onions, alcohol, and the sea
Coulisse Gallery, Stockholm (2025)

​

​

The title of this exhibition arrives as a fragment already displaced: a phone photograph of a book page, sent by a friend in the aftermath of a long-distance call. The page described an exercise, perhaps related to lucid dreaming or mindfulness, but what remains is the list it carried: incense, smoke, perfume, coffee, onions, alcohol, and the sea. Detached from author or context, the fragment takes on a strange precision. It does not describe what is shown, nor does it serve as instruction. Instead, it hovers above the exhibition as a catalogue that promises encompassment by missing its mark, a poetic shard of presence that is always already estranged.

​

The exhibition unfolds through fragments that gesture outward, as if cut from a larger system. Meadow-segments hold rods that lift matte, shadowed stars, constellations drawn from bodies that may already be gone. The miniatures intensify this condition: each edge implies continuation, each border pressed smooth as if to signal what exceeds it. Roses recur across the works, sometimes growing and wilting at points of absence, sometimes gathered into bouquets and placed on the ground, as if offered, discarded, or left behind. In bouquet form they embody a paradox: abundance that exposes its own insufficiency, a gesture of beauty that is humbly never enough. Presence gathers in these gestures not through what is secured, but through what is missing, the whole glimpsed only in its ruptures and displacements.

​

At the margins, symbols double back on themselves. A streetlight bends into sympathy with a wilting rose. A wilting rose bends into sympathy with a bending streetlight. Oxidized copper butterflies anchor themselves in the corners at rigid angles: part of the architecture, part of their own joke. They parody the test they invoke — Rorschach blots that already resemble butterflies, interpreted back into the butterflies they always were. Recognition recognizing recognition. Disturbances poised to proliferate, like the smallest shift capable of unsettling a system, wings frozen into inevitability, suggesting that this particular distribution of reality could not exist in any other way.

​

Other works hold themselves at the edge of legibility: mirrors that promise infinity only to withdraw it, and an easily-overlooked bottle that hovers between work and non-work. What threads all of this together is a constraint active since midsummer 2025: a custom auto-correction that substitutes one word with another, consistently and without exception, not only in language but in process. It operates as a quiet interference, smuggled into the works and their paratexts, a controlled instance of non-control. A glitch that unsettles chains of meaning while quietly directing their course.

 

Across the exhibition, contradictions are not resolved but sustained. Rules falter, signs drift, containers strain at their edges. Instability here is not failure but method, cultivated as a way of approaching the real as something excessive, recursive, unstable. The works do not present the whole, but they let us sense it through absence, through the breaks and cuts that mark its impossibility.

The opening reception included a reading by Stockholm-based artist and poet Eugene Sundelius von Rosen.
With deep gratitude to Eugene for the generosity, presence, and resonance he brought to the evening.

​

​