With Safari, the Swedish-born Tokyo-based artist Anders Edström presents a series of over fifty color photographs that use light, gravity, and time to explore the viscosity of paint. In his wide-ranging investigation, Edström finds that small puddles of enamel paint will form oily glazes, metallic swirls, and puckered topographies, their surface tension holding them to irregular shapes defined by time.
As Bennett Simpson describes in an accompanying essay, “The soft, existing light pervading the enameled pigments, themselves vibrations of earthy ochres, burnt greens, grays and rusts, suggests a serial display of substance becoming surface - a movement between polish, glaze, and liquid on the one hand and roughness, texture, and mineral on the other. The pleasure, for me, comes in realizing that Edstrom’s formal and material reduction is here no different than elsewhere in his work. Subject matter, whatever it is, only serves sensibility.”