WASTES OF TIME

The title WASTES OF TIME carries both irony and gravity. It refers to art as a “waste of time” in modern economic thinking – but also to the physical traces left by time, such as by-products, imprints, and lost objects. In the plural – wastes – time becomes a landscape, slowly eroding, excavating, and accumulating. A wasteland of fragments. A future archaeological zone. Kristian Jon Larsen’s sculptures arise from the physical encounter between material and transience. In his formations cast in sand and metal, he creates mental and material plateaus: relics without origin, testimonies without history. His works balance between the industrial and the ritual – posing the question: which objects will outlive us? Kasper Jacek’s works operate in two displaced temporalities. His canvas pieces unfold in a near future where the rain never stops. Here, fear haunts our dreams, and sky and earth have merged into one foggy landscape. The tin-based assemblages – combining found objects, small canvases, and woven linen – mimic excavations in a distant future, as if our current culture has been buried and later unearthed. The works are rooted in a central motif: a wood carving inherited from Jacek’s grandfather, combined with the coiling figure of a snake, which becomes a symbol of today’s idols and the faltering worldview we try to navigate – a state in which we have abandoned old principles and allow new, hollow symbols to take over while the planet burns and meaning evaporates. Both Jacek and Larsen work with the object as something that survives – or resurfaces as a memory, an echo, a shadow. Their works open up multi-temporal landscapes where past, future, and present converge in asymmetric, unbalanced images. Here, art becomes a space for reflection and idling – a “waste of time” that nonetheless manages to grasp something we thought was lost. Kasper Jacek (b. 1989) works with a self-developed collage practice, where materials become tools for capturing fleeting moments – instances in which the places we move through suddenly open up and allow us to glimpse something we thought forgotten. In Jacek’s work, visual distortion serves as a fundamental metaphor – an opening to a world seen differently. His images appear as multi-temporal scenes, where materials, movements, colors, and figurations interweave to form landscapes haunted by myths, memories, and possible futures. Jacek is a self-taught visual artist based in Odder/Aarhus, with a background in academic and journalistic communication, focusing on the histories, mythologies, and narratives of places, as well as the objects we surround ourselves with. Kristian Jon Larsen (b. 1982) has a background in photography and primarily works with sculpture and ceramics. Using a wide range of techniques, he explores the material’s inherent capacity to convey emotions, moods, and concerns. His work spans from small ceramic sculptures to large-scale pieces in metal, fabric, charred wood, and plastic – often including site-specific, public installations. He is part of the artist collective Staldgade 74 and has exhibited at, among others, Eks-rummet and Staldgade 74.