OSLO.- The exhibition time machines by Norwegian artist Jone Kvie at OSL contemporary continues the artist’s long-standing exploration of a forgotten vision of the world and the forces that govern it. In this pre-rational cosmology, the living realm is animated by elemental forces—fire, air, water, and earth—moved by Love and Strife rather than abstract laws. Knowledge arises not through mastery or measurement, but through attunement to circulating forces and their instabilities. Moving between this ancient understanding of the laws of nature and modern sculpture—through a search for sensuality within mineral matter and the staging of gravity as a sculptural principle—Kvie’s practice runs counter to the technical processes that have reduced the primordial energies of things and beings to mere mathematical curves. Added to this fracture between the ancient and the modern is a life held in balance between Stavanger—city of the petro-titans—and Naples, cradle of the Baroque, whose horizon is dominated by the fiery lung of Mount Vesuvius. Whether by chance or through a secret fascination with what erupts, Jone Kvie’s trajectory led him to live close to gaping, burning gateways to the lower terrestrial circles. After five years in Naples, the artist has recently returned to Stavanger. The exhibition thus takes the form of a portrait of Naples, a palimpsest city where history and mythologies have sedimented in flesh as much as in rock, while also bringing together the visions of an artist who himself became lost in a Grand Tour lasting nearly a decade.

The exhibition opens with body, a massive volcanic rock resting on multiple metal beams. Blocking the passage, the work forces the visitor to step over it, inverting Michael Heizer’s gesture which, with Levitated Mass (2012), allowed the viewer to circulate beneath a titanic rock mass. The exhibition’s center of gravity, body, links minimalist asceticism to a premodern tradition of thought, in which the subject/object distinction had not yet flattened our relationship to existence. The world was then populated by energies inseparable from affects. In this sense, the work—apparently static—is in fact engaged in a permanent search for balance: its stability depends solely on the distribution of its mass across the beams. Echoing the reflections of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, whose passion for fire led him to throw himself into the mouth of a volcano, Jone Kvie seems to have drawn upon cosmogonic visions from a time when the stars spoke the language of forbidden deities.

In Flesh and Stone (1996), American sociologist Richard Sennett describes the passage from the carnal, embodied, and chaotic city to the hygienic, regulated, and automated modern metropolis. If, today, the former has largely dissolved into the latter, time machines celebrates the city as a constellation of erogenous zones where affects and intensities collide. To grasp the intimate relationship each city maintains with its inhabitants, one need only observe how cities personify themselves through canonized urban figures that crystallize postures and attitudes: London and the dandy, Paris and the flâneur, and of course Naples and Pulcinella. An embodiment of moral ambiguity, the latter appears in Mask (2025), a monumental sculpture in gray marble reproducing the sly face of the commedia dell’arte anti-hero, an emblematic figure of the Campanian city. The sculpture’s form also refers to one of humanity’s earliest gestures of concealment: the dancing shaman, a parietal figure from the Trois-Frères cave in Ariège, France. By tracing a history of the mask from prehistoric art to the Renaissance, a genealogy of humanity as an act of usurpation emerges.

The portrait of Naples continues with two phallic marble sculptures that originally formed a portico, salthour (2025). Laid horizontally and deprived of the vertical authority that once allowed them to mark the passage from public to private space, they acquire a new meaning through their title. salthour proposes a poetic measure of time, situated at the intersection of biological time and geological history, through the dual nature of salt as both a preservative and a corrosive agent. By associating this material with the notion of the “hour”, Jone Kvie suggests that time is not merely a human convention but a physical process inscribed in our bodies as much as in earthly matter.

With Detritus (2025), the exhibition opens onto a metaphysical comedy. Composed of a long bathroom countertop in Rosso Francia marble, autonomous and pierced by two openings deprived of their sinks, the sculpture diverts marble—arte povera’s material par excellence, historically used to evoke eternity—by suspending its primary function. The work also cultivates a bodily ambiguity: its polished surface, red and veined with white, evokes glistening flesh. In Kvie’s work, marble conjures up the sensuality of its ancient use, favored for capturing heroic contours or the vulnerability of a chest. Here, however, far from any mannerism, the artist substitutes a cold, almost clinical cut.

Finally, the exhibition concludes with revenant (2025). Composed of two slices of gray marble arranged as mirror images in the manner of a Rorschach test, the work refers to the very process of the material’s sedimentation: an accumulation of animal carcasses compressed over millions of years, an inhuman time irreducible to the individual scale. Stripped of all ornamentation, these sculptures act as an anatomical cross-section of time, confronting the viewer with the impossibility of grasping its depth except through weight, mass, and precarious balance.

time machines subtly explores the figure of the artist as a Pulcinella-like character, wielding ambiguity, ambivalence, and false appearances as method. The absurdity of the human condition is revealed through the use of geological time—counted in millions of years—mobilized to adorn bourgeois bathrooms. It is perhaps in this negotiation with unbearable scales of magnitude that the banal, whether interior decoration or, to a lesser extent, a work of art, acquires its critical charge. With a distinctly Neapolitan sense of irony, Jone Kvie invites us to move among sculptures in volcanic rock or marble—the latter a quintessential memento mori substance—in which our material destiny is reflected without embellishment.

“Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.”

Apocryphal citation of Antoine Lavoisier, Traité élémentaire de chimie (1789).

– by Charles Teyssou

Jone Kvie (b. 1971, Stavanger) lives and works in Naples and Stavanger. His practice as a sculptor is characterised by a fascination with existential questions, and by an intention to extend the notion of art towards contemplation over the world’s being, and what it means to be human in it. Our will to know and interpret the “natural world” is reflected in Kvie’s attention to cultural interpretations, archetypes and myths, and finally in his choices of themes, form, materials and titles. Often taking on the unfathomable and unknown as his subject matter, his sculptures may be read both as reflections on our attempts to understand and as physical manifestations of the ideas that are created in these attempts. Mental and abstract conceptions become objects with independent existence, often appearing surprisingly recognisable in their firm presence.

Kvie has exhibited extensively, including ARoS Art Museum (Aarhus), The National Museum, Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo), Bergen Art Museum, Malmö Art Museum and Gothenburg Museum of Art.

Highlights include his solo exhibitions Vessels at the Vigeland Museum in Oslo (2017), Metamorfos at the Gothenburg Museum of Art (2018), and Here here at Stavanger Kunstmuseum (2019).

He has been involved in several public and private commissions, and is represented in key public and private collections including Corcoran Museum (Washington DC), AROS (Aarhus); The National Museum of Art (Oslo), The National Public Arts Council (Stockholm), Malmö Art Museum, Kode Bergen, Stavanger Kunstmuseum, in addition to a permanent installation at the Gothenburg Museum of Art.

In 2022, Kvie participated in documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany, and was part of a group show in Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark. He also presented a solo exhibition what comes after certainty at Örebro konsthall, Sweden. In 2025, he was part of the group exhibition Apocalypse: From Last Judgement to Climate Threat at the Gothenburg Museum of Art.

Kvie is a member of LABINAC, a design collective founded by Maria Thereza Alves and Jimmie Durham.

Charles Teyssou is a curator based in Paris and the artistic director of Stavanger Secession in Stavanger, Norway. He is currently working on the release of Cruising Pavilion: Architecture, Dissident Sex, and Cruising Cultures, a publication on homosexual cruising, published by HEAD (Geneva) and Spector Books (Leipzig).