Ian Kiaer
Pink Cloth, Orange Squares, Small, 2021

In the introduction text to Ian Kiaer’s exhibition at Marcelle Alix in 2021, Isabelle Alfonsi, following Anna Tsing’s observations on capitalism’s ruins and “life without a promise of stability”, links Kiaer’s paintings to “[a] world where precarity is the norm, where the idea of progress no longer manages to prevail, [and] temporary arrangements of mineral, animal, plant and human lives settle within the ruin (…). How may we journey in what remains of painting, starting from the smallest possible signifier: the spot of pigment, the dust deposited on the canvas, the square grid pattern drawn with pencil, the aluminium trace of a work that no longer exists, the Plexiglas retrieved from the streets?…”