Fredrik Vaerslev

All Around Amateur

All Around Amateur brings together two distinct projects. The first consists of paintings based on photographs of sunsets taken with a mobile phone during airplane journeys. They were created with a marking machine used for painting lines on roads or sports fields. The aerosol paints available for this kind of tool only come in red, blue, yellow and white. Once the colors are applied to the canvas, Fredrik Vaerslev and his assistant Per Christian Barth mix them with turpentine, to create a gradient that resembles sunset shades. The canvases are then stretched across a frame of the same size and arranged in a continuous line. Made in series of 8 successive paintings, their sequences can be read in the exhibition as a gradient going from dark tones to light. The second project is a continuation of a practice established by Vaerslev when his mother asked him to add a shelf below his paintings that she could put plants or knickknacks on. He created a series of light wooden shelves that he asked artist and non-artist friends to decorate. For All Around Amateur, Vaerslev created himself a series of shelves and also asked other artist friends to make them: Stewart Uoo, Josh Smith, Alison Katz, Matias Faldbakken and Gardar Eide Einarsson.