CURA.

Matias Faldbakken presents his new body of works at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich as abstract drawings on paper, on canvas, and with pewter, contextualising his gestural approach to drawing, intended as marking an action.

Faldbakken is well known for wearing a writer’s hat while walking in artist’s shoes, and despite his claimed distinction between the two disciplines, it’s hard to avoid referring to the notes he chose to accompany his show. Charged with a rather conceptual tone, these expand on some of the aspects emerging from his artworks, privileging embodiment over description. “Drawing refuses to be fresh”, he states, situating the practice as an antagonistic force that resists progress, technological advancement and cultural trendisation. Whether rendered in graphite, ink, or cast in pewter, the works in the show resist seamless interpretation while also allowing for the recurrence of patterns or motifs. For example, three works under the title Titus —respectively a pencil and ink on paper, a sand cast pewter, and a charcoal and ink on brown paper installed in a sequence— present a variation of similar curvilinear signs between the geometrical and the ethereal. They engage in an ongoing push-and-pull between material presence and conceptual negation, which is especially evident in Faldbakken’s use of pewter, a material historically associated with functional objects rather than artistic mark-making. It is perhaps particularly through these  sharp-cornered zig-zag casts that the artist remarks drawing beyond the medium, as a track of thought, gesture and process.

Abstraction too, for Faldbakken, is not a style but a method. One of withdrawal, that detaches from figuration in favour of everted politic. His note “abstracting away, funeral by funeral,” reinforces the notion of abstraction as a process of continuous burial, a shedding of narrative and pictorial expectation. This same idea plays out in the exhibition’s titles, which frequently incorporate omissions, alterations, or deliberate distortions. Works such as Tyrant Without Yran and Accomplish Without Ccomplis suggest a linguistic breakdown, a parallel to the way his drawings fragment and resist cohesion. This titling strategy mirrors the dynamics of erasure and repetition that run throughout the exhibition, reinforcing the idea that abstraction is not just a visual expression but an active process of destabilization.

Ultimately, Faldbakken’s exhibition does not just present drawings—it dissects and problematizes the very concept of drawing itself. In doing so, it positions the act of mark-making as an act of refusal to submit to clarity, resolution, or easy categorization. His works demonstrate that its power lies precisely in that refusal to be contemporary, to be readable, to be anything other than what it is: a space of negotiation between presence and absence, assertion and negation, material and idea.