Reduce. Minimize. Find a common typology and seek an analogous form. Repeat. De-saturate. Enable. Meaning is derived from our capacity to invent. Imagine. Find trace and allow it to infiltrate and inform. Without drawing parallels, we seek answers in what little has been given to us. Repeat. Reduce. Imagine.


Dan Skjæveland is a Norwegian artist whose new book 33 Suspensions asks the viewer to engage with clues and cryptic signals. Slippage occurs; memories of memory. Rules are fragmented and declarations declined. 
Decode. Decipher. Glyphs. Numbers.

Skjæveland’s images are demarcated by muted color, potential connections.

Transparencies, reflections, smudges and remnants. Residues of an urban palette. Gradations of grey, an interplay between warm and cool. Tensions hang in the air, almost-abstraction modulating earth tone and metallic.

The viewer draws out their own meanings from the work. The images brood in an obtuse melancholy and echo American conceptual practice. To delineate a strict path of meaning would disable the work and encroach on the profane. 
Conceive. Deceive. Contradict.


33 Suspensions is not an exercise in willful avoidance. There is instead courage to assemble and proliferate ambiguous images, origins masked and muddied. What reality do we occupy? Skjæveland’s images shimmer in their instability. As they take form and recede, the viewer is invited into a world without absolutes.

— Brad Feuerhelm, October 2023