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Arsi Keva
February, 2017
Arsi Keva’s current series of acrylic paintings, Up in the Ass of Timo – and other meme paintings, is a blunt expression of our contemporary zeitgeist… on steroids. Using the ubiquitous stream of Finnish internet memes as his starting point, Keva playfully re-visualizes them in a naive, primitivist mode. The result seems to both poke fun at the assumed savvy of our fast-moving digital era while also bringing a mood of sweet (pseudo) nostalgia to our shared contemporary pop-culture moments.
Arsi Keva writes:
“I was interested in the paradoxical clash of engaging the new, quicksilver visual environment of the internet with the traditional, slow and concrete medium of painting. One of my aims with these memes was to slow down the mind-numbing visual overload of our current experience and bring it into a static, material, more sustainable form.”