Lokalt Landskab
By Trine Møller Madsen

The Argentine artist Karina Peisajovich works with light and shadow in painting. Rather than modeling light and shadow by means of oil or acrylics, the artists creates the contrasts by means of spotlights and lamps. The result is a changeable, large-scale installation that manipulates the layout and nature of the PAINTBOX room in new ways.

Karina Peisajovich calls her installations 'performative paintings' - paintings which act in the room with the objective of affecting or even transforming the architecture.
Up until the late 1990s, Peisajovich worked exclusively with paint on canvas. She then embarked on her experiments with the performative potential of painting, leaving behind the restrictions of canvases in favour of 'scenic' installations. Lighting is significant aspect of this new approach to painting. Instead of representing light and shadow by means of pigment and brushwork on the canvas, Peisajovich works with real-life light and shade.

The Lokalt Landskab presented at PAINTBOX extensions is a version of a work which Peisajovich has previously presented in New York, Madrid, and Buenos Aires. In the installation Peisajovich creates new perspectives, new spaces. This is done by means of figurative and abstract motifs painted onto the walls and ceilings and projections of light and shadow. The shadow images are called up by illuminating cut-outs suspended between the wall and the light. All lighting is connected to timer controls that continuously change the intensity of the light. The room is changeable and diffuse.

Lokalt Landskab challenges our perception of space and reality. It is a mobile installation, one which not only confronts physical architecture but goes so far as to break it down in order to give it a rebirth in the form of new, fictive landscapes.

Press release for the opening of the exhibition
Paintbox extensions 2004