• Simon Dybbroe Møller

“O”

O is the opening.. O is a belly. O is volume. O is the title of this my second show at Francesca Minini. It is a show that is meant to oscillate between the too much and the less than little; between limitless expenditure and passive indifference. The O’s roll through this text. They drive it on.

In front of you Things And The Thoughts That Think Them (Man) (2011) consists of several objects encased in acrylic glass boxes and then stacked. The boxes share qualities with the vitrine (they are transparent) and with the moving box (they render the objects they encase „stackable“). These things are nothing special. They maybe even look as if no one has really chosen them; as if they have chosen themselves. The boxed things are stacked to clumsily resemble a man. A totem that fuses the way of man with the way of material.

“[…]man becomes all things by not understanding them. […] when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.“
-Giambattista Vico

If O is a thing it is a thing that signifies nothing. On the walls you see O, 2011. In these inkjet prints the same subject is reproduced over and over, only in different colours and styles. The subject is nothing. They have their origin in Word, a program released in 1983 by Microsoft. In this program, one is offered a selected range of types, colours and sizes to produce and output letters. One is likewise offered the option to cancel these choices again. These O’s are unfinished. They have never gone full circle and become holes in language. Instead they just smile back at us.

„Some things have value to us people, because they have value to us people.“
-Pablo Henrik Llambias

O is absence of value. The video at the back of the gallery, The Drift, 2010 is obviously mimicking a format known to us from public service art history programs, or perhaps its younger and impromptu relative that we know from YouTube. That is: It is educational. Apparently edifying. Apparently enlightening. It contains a lot of information that you have very little chance of decoding¨. Basically it lists and depicts stuff. Stuff in a muddle, stuff in mud. Stuff as in everything and nothing.

Yours truly,
Simon Dybbroe Møller