Carl Mannov ,Motorcycles and flames 7, 2015 and i’m_too_sad_to_tell_you.fla, 2015
Carl Mannov is a trolley. C-A-R-L-M-A-N-N-O-V. The letters are sprayed in black. Wooden floor. Metal frame. Sturdy wheels. It would be disappointed if merely left with the task of wheeling paintings around. This trolley has other talents. This trolley is able to carry that weight. This trolley makes it possible to remain curious. Whatever object found or made, whatever needing to go somewhere or elsewhere, or whenever missing a seat to sit down for a cigarette and a sense of overview of the studio. The objects going on top, it appears, are always centred. You can tell because the one R and the two Ns are about to get scratched out. It makes the letters appear more or less the same. But there still is no doubt: this trolley is Carl Mannov.
Carl Mannov is a tool. Carl Mannov is a desk with a wheelie chair. Carl Mannov is a graph on a whiteboard. Carl Mannov is a doodle drawing on a post-it note (now crumpled and tossed into the paper basket). An absent-minded rendering of the objects that surround that multi-coloured cube on the office desk but that you don’t have to draw to remember: the coffee cup, the phone, the computer screen, the keycard holder. A lazy line is capturing the icon of incoming mail, a thumbs up, a mobile phone with a smile on its screen. A lazy start to the day starts with water cooler conversations. “Small talk comes from small bones”, if you can trust Ezra Pound. Carl Mannov makes paintings of chitchat.
Carl Mannov is a plinth that is made without the necessary skills, tools and materials at hand. A mosaic of decisions, hesitations and transitions. A crooked line bending around a crooked corner. Carl Mannov is the box that never really fits the floor, whether concrete, tiles, wood or a linoleum cover that should have long since been removed. Carl Mannov tried by painting it grey. Carl Mannov can not change the architecture he is part of. Carl Mannov is the low man on the totem pole.
Carl Mannov (born 1990, Copenhagen) is an MA student of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Former exhibitions include “Conflicting Evidence” at 1857, Oslo, “No buddy but our shelves” at Oslo Prosjektrom, Oslo, and “Rambuk” at kazachenko’s apartment, Oslo.