BERLIN.- Galerie Michael Janssen presents a selection of Emil Holmer’s recent paintings. Dead Letters is the first solo exhibition of the Swedish artist at the gallery. Born in Karlstad in 1975, Holmer studied at the Academy of Arts in Umeå and at the U.D.K. in Berlin, where he was a guest student in the class of Tony Cragg. In recent years, Holmer had several solo exhibitions in Europe, Australia and South Africa.

Emil Holmer’s paintings are cathartic explosions; axes, spears, wood constructions, body parts as well as abstract geometric forms and amorphous shapes seem to be exploding like fireworks on the canvas or are just heaped up like debris after an apocalyptic video game war. Holmer’s works are reminiscent of Graffiti and the avant-garde movement COBRA, whose primary focus consisted of semi-abstract paintings with brilliant color, violent brushwork and distorted human figures.

The large format paintings are violent image symphonies, in which the densityinherent in every depicted scene creates a blur, straining the viewer’s eyes. Drawing on such areas as psychopathology, fear, power, sexuality and thebody, Emil Holmer is strongly influenced by pop culture, midway between the horror film and the comic strip.

Since the Chaos and Fractal Theory, “chaos” doesn’t simply mean ‘anarchy’ but ‘a higher order’: out of confusion and complexity life emerges as a functioning organism. Chaos displays an innate tendency to form into patterns and structures and it fosters and commands order despite of all forces that act against it. Self organization is the result of re-invention and creative adaptation due to the introduction of perturbed equilibrium. Holmer’s paintings are one example of an organization, which exists in a constant state of perturbation, with irregularities,even randomness in the dynamics of systems considered as ‘ordered’ by the traditional views.