What happens when we walk across the floor of a studio, gallery, or museum in the direction of Fredrik Værslev’s pyramidal paintings? We see something that is a bit unexpected: paintings extending far beyond the wall and their own wooden stretchers, each one culminating in an apex like the pyramidal textile roof one sees in small party tents, or in the campaign tents used by the generals of antiquity when visiting a battlefield. When we position ourselves right in front of these paintings, as we have been taught to do when looking at art, we notice that this unexpected thing that happened when we came in closer along the wall and from the side has now been fleshed out—we experience the painting not only with our eyes and feet (when we walked into the room and saw that the paintings were sticking out), but also with our belly. The paintings have an effect, both an optical and an entirely corporeal one. Something is happening to us here. (Asmund Thorkildsen) Pyramid Scheme brings together 18 works from the series and translates and expands this sensory experience into the medium of the artist’s book. With two supplementary texts by Peter J. Amdam and Åsmund Thorkildsen.
