Faldbakken’s practice holds in perpetual tension the forces of proposition and cancellation, vandalism and erasure, aesthetic generosity and conceptual restraint, the possibility of language and its abstraction into illegibility. A consistent characteristic of his work is the poverty of his materials, using framed garbage bags and flattened cardboard boxes as the ground for abstract or minimal gestures. The marks on the surface of these works sometimes appear not within the frame but on the surface of the glass and the edges of the frame itself. Smudged and erased, they propose a mark and its effacement in a single gesture. Mass-produced objects designed to contain form the basis of his recent sculptural works. Jerry cans, silencers, bags, lockers, bottles, books, VHS cassettes, cardboard boxes and more are subjected to various manipulations and often rendered useless: stacked, crushed, flattened, painted, cut, everted, spilling their contents, becoming their own content, the objects he adapts often veer between the iconic and the almost painfully generic.
