Henrik Potter: 23/24

Aphasic Paragraphs About Henrik Potter

Nobody reads press texts. They’re often nonsense, and doing justice to Henrik Potter means saying what he’s made in half-a-page-or-so of clear English.

Or, at least, punters never read press texts in a gallery space when they should be chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ (that is, schmoozin’, boozin’, and mispronouncedly Deleuzin’), or heartily guffawing at some barbarous darling’s unfunny anecdotes while nibbling on something salty (if the budget allows).

Or, if a viewer does end up reading the text, they need to know that they really shouldn’t, and might, in fact, be advised to put it down this very instant – but gently, guiltlessly – and look at the works in the space with their own eyes.

Or, if we are going to have a press text, and you really are committed to reading it here and now, or keeping it for later as a reminder of a specific place and time, there’s one golden common-sense rule with an important sub-rule of its own:

1. Never should it be a self-indulgent meta-text, especially if it tries to show off with references to current cultural trends or worse, a once-radical-but-now-merely-mennerist-to-the-point-of-despicable-pseudo-intellectual-cliché theoretical position, and

a. NEVER EVER should it be the kind of self-indulgent meta-text that points out how the very idea of a self-indulgent meta-text is bad and stupid and wrong, so the writer shouldn't be read dead writing one and the reader mustn't be caught dead reading one.

Henrik has made two types of works: physical objects that look like window shutters or church panel triptychs with abstract paintings behind their ‘wings’, and drawings (disembodied heads, hands, fingers, eyes) mounted into the frames by pins pushed through the paper.

Thematically, Henrik’s starting point was aphasia, a language disorder that often produces problems like difficulty in finding the correct word for an object, or confusing words with each other. Another is that, with two exceptions (including this), all the curators, gallerists, and writers half-Swedish Henrik has worked with haven't been British, so he suspects he's better understood in Europe.

Henrik thinks of the larger works as surrogates for himself – each has its own personality and together they form a community. The drawings illustrate what the larger works mean. If the larger works act as physical "bodies" and might anticipate how members of a collective body could interact, the fragments of human figures in the drawings are about how we really do or really fail to communicate with one another. Eyes, for example, are the organ of reception and vision is mostly primary in art, but they're separated from the disembodied heads, which could never see or think or feel or act, artistically, politically, or in any other way.

It’s rare for Henrik to make or show drawings, and he’s very careful about not overexplaining what he’s done or being didactic. There is, however, some personal and symbolic significance to the drawings: they're all from imaginary sources, not anatomical studies. If there's a violence and sense of melancholy here, it's less about grossing us out than asking more poetic questions about what we share as human beings, a pretty basic issue that's increasingly getting lost when nothing out there - not objects, nor bodies, and certainly never the date they're reduced to - has lasting value, if it ever really did.

— Max L. Feldman