Issy Wood is diabolical, irresistible like a kitten reel. Her show Fish, Fish, Duck at Kistefos unfolds like a teenage journal, doomscrolling in bed, a psychoanalytic session and a generational portrait. All bound by that secret and collectively shared intimate sense of shame or embarrassment, here held at a safe distance as we get to appreciate familiarly cropped designer shoes, a Kinder snack, or that iridescent butt of a younger self believed to become a promising gymnast. Framed tightly to fill the pictorial surface, Wood’s paintings are renowned for conveying the claustrophobic condition of the digital image while simultaneously eroticising the objects they depict. Wood lets the cuteness and the misty shades all her subjects are given, carry a certain soft edge bordering on the absurd. In the blink of an eye, the sacred has already put on a spring-summer trash. One can’t help but want more.

A peek into her exhibition may start with classy silverware and end with Diet Coke: hierarchies in Savasana (aka corpse pose), as prudence is let go and algorithmic bombardment takes its course. One of the thematic frameworks curators Live Drønen and Kate Smith-Raabe employed to structure the show is “The Artist as Archivist”, which well addresses Wood’s practice of collecting and reworking motifs into an affective repository organised less by personal taste than by a non-systematic obsession given by insistence, reflecting an image economy in which attention is currency and circulatory system. Her paintings, Wood says, emerge from devoted greed and masochism: the desire to possess an image completely and the willingness to spend hours in the company of something mildly repulsive. Fascination and aversion remain locked even within the space of a single canvas, as is the case with the oil-on-velvet Sorry, it’s just my nature (2021), where the voyeuristic attention lavished on the folds of a red leather trench coat meets the puffy cheeks of two creepily vacant porcelain beavers.

Before painting, Wood worked extensively with collage, and that sensibility remains alive in the composition of her artworks, where relationships emerge through playfulness, repetition and free association. This is also where Wood’s paintings become kind of psychoanalytic. One object calls another to mind, and many recur untamed. Desire puts its hands in the pockets of disgust. Luxury winks to repressed kitsch, and chance is given its longing stage despite the highly controlled figuration that delineates its contour. No wonder the queen of the show is a dice-covered chaise-long, especially painted for the occasion.

Across the exhibition, at least three depictions of padlocks and door handles appear. Only the star-shaped lock of I miss the old Issy (2026) has its key in the keyhole, yet it remains closed, like the sealed zip of the caramel-coloured jacket it is paired with. There is a general sense of encryption, particularly conveyed by the series of self-portraits belonging to the artist’s personal collection. Behind pills, glitter make-up, translucent Korean rice-milk beauty masks or cute gummies, Wood’s own face—also cropped, and occasionally framed by her own fingers, rendering the whole slightly caricaturesque—is treated like any other object of her compositions, erasing distinctions between subject and thing as fragmentation evidently appears as a method. Emblematically Self portrait 66 (2025) represents the artist in a selfie-pose while hospitalised. Vulnerability is laid bare only to be immediately re-mediated, filtered through the same detached visual regime that governs everything else. It is the strikingly cold precision of execution that produces the tension between affect and image: what appears exposed is in fact carefully constructed, even narcissistically so. Yet emotional instability lingers existentially, at once ghostly and hyper-visible like Wood’s entire universe.

There is no better way to put it than in Sinziana Ravini’s text included in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition: Wood’s paintings operate as a form of “cultural exorcism”, conjuring the spectres of advanced capitalism with such precision that the demons of our society reveal themselves as the architects of the most inner desires, exposing the perversity of any emotional investment in the objects Wood depicts. What remains after moving through the show is a sense of subjectivity distributed across things, absorbed into all those velvety surfaces that both seduce and swallow up. The result is corrosive, funny and slightly melancholic. The urge to possess Wood’s work—at least the way I experience it—seems to arise precisely from this uncontrollable erotic force that binds like a curse.