Not another livestream

Bjarne Melgaard is a painter who lays it on thick, literally and metaphorically. His canvases are often caked with gargantuan, wave-like clumps of oil paint that travesty any attempt at good behaviour or painterly refinement. This purposefully crude, childlike approach is a perfect reflection of the larger economy of images from which Melgaard’s work derives, hyperbolizing their direct modes of address and simple logic, to the point of near-total visual saturation. The flatness of Melgaard’s characters is weighed against their florid realisations in paint, oozing with raw material and emotion. For NOT ANOTHER LIVESTREAM, Melgaard developed a print that puts his unique process on display, linked, as the title suggests, to the horror of having to participate in yet another streamed meeting or event. In this, the central character melds with their Zoomed self, in a colourful and apt take on the effects of digital exhaustion and its bewildering reformulation of one’s body.