TOMAS LAHODA, “AD PAINTINGS”, PAINTING AND DIGITAL COLLAGE

01-09-2005 – 08-10-2005

Welcome to the opening Thursday September 1st 2005, 5-7 pm.

Galerie Birthe Laursen proudly presents the first solo exhibition in Denmark in many years with the Czech artist Tomas Lahoda.

The exhibition Ad Paintings displays paintings and digital collages, reflecting and investigating concepts, methods and messages from the commercial environment. With his psychedelic models and his pseudo abstract compositions, Lahoda paraphrases advertisements for perfume, eyeglasses, shoes and other fashion accessories. In a weird universe, his paintings re-contextualise the persuading nature and thought-provoking imagery of advertisements. Through styling and crossover techniques, and through a vibrating and fluorescent bubble gum colour scale, Lahodas’ paintings arise out of deformed models surrounded by a kinky repertoire of pasted pastiches of perfume flacons. In the collages, advertising slogans from different products are reduced to almost indecipherable neo-geometric compositions, forming characters into balancing and harmonious colour fields.

The point of departure of Tomas Lahoda is a world, where the displaying of the aura of consumer goods drains the object of the actual economic value. The consumer goods are established as materialised manifestations of longings and aims. According to Lahoda, the power of attraction, of superficiality, and of visual manipulation, create dreams, desires and expectations that we project upon the world of consumer goods. In all its perfection and focus, the presentation of consumer goods suggest – as well as the paintings of Lahoda, which are based on them and are inspired by them – that which the consumer world pretends to offer: the absolutely beautiful, the eternally new and ”consumable” perfection. The aesthetics of consumer goods – the glamour of things – create a synthetic environment of permanent desire and of wanting to be desired. Like this, consumer goods acquire a new identity, a new significance, and a new soul. Especially accessories can, according to Lahoda, be seen as the ideal picture of the presents’ alter – as prototypes that serve the narcissistic fulfilment of desire, the striving for security and the attainment of social status.

Tomas Lahoda, born in 1954, is educated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He has worked as senior lecturer at Det Jyske Kunstakademi, Århus, exhibited at galleries and museums, mainly in Denmark and in the Czech Republic, and made performances with Hotel Pro Forma.

The exhibition continues to October 8th 2005.