Tore Winsents

Tore Winsents

Snart Kommer Det Lystige Bider 2

24 January - 9 February 2025

Mikey Laundry Art Garden MLAG

Halfdan Kjerulfsgate 4, 5017, Bergen.

Opening Hours: 1-5 pm Saturdays and Sundays or by appointment

www.mikeylaundryartgarden.com

IG:@mikeylaundryartgarden2

Photos: Daniel Torkelsen

Tore Winsents b. 1985 Bergen is a painter primarily working in oil. Winsents holds a BA from the Bergen Art Academy, in 2015.

This is Winsents’ first solo exhibition with the gallery. Tore is a fantastically enigmatic person and artist.
I first got to know him about 10 years ago. I got invited over to his house for a barbecue. At that time, he was living in Sagene. Tore was kind of living like a skid up there, making sculptures and painting in the oldest medieval building in the neighborhood. There was usually a chain of really interesting people coming and going out of that apartment. Tore must’ve had tens of thousands of A4 papers stacked in columns anywhere from shin to thigh height. I realized that he had managed to draw his portrait over and over again. There was his face - or at least a kind of illustration of his face showing up again and again restricting himself only to about one blue, one green and I can’t remember what the other colour was. It was a mix of pencil crayon, and marker. The whole activity was equal parts artistic exploration, and part Stephen King. The process made me wonder why? What is this artist discovering in doing this? What does it mean?
This kind of desire to understand is not the same as the desire to be understood. There is something that Tore has that all great artists hold, it’s the ability to captivate us and make us wonder why and how the artist gets to this point. I’m not sure how we got to this point, but it’s funny when you ask other people and other artists about Tore, they all have a good story about him and I haven’t met anyone who has not held him in high esteem either as a person or as an artist.
As a painter he is charming. The colour palette on his brushes is pushed around in gestures that are both simple and exist within a pleasant time and space. A signaling of the pastoral exists paradoxically side-by-side the urban. The works are serene in the positioning of the individual in this idealized state. As soon as one attempts to define the figurative and its function in Tore’s urban pastoral, one quickly learns the limits and the problematics of interpretation. Susan Sontag argued that interpretation takes the sensory for granted. Tore’s work at MLAG appeals to our senses and makes us soft in our curiosity.

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