resemblance to the late, young master of Neo-expressionism. In the paintings of “Whellkom” there are recurring characters, changeling mutants who emerge and disappear from nuclear fallout dystopias and apocalyptic urban agglomerations like wraiths come to signal the end of the beginning. It is a picture meticulously orchestrated with a motive stillness in his “Demonstration” (2017), which revives the glory
36
of cinematic blockbusters in an alternate future that self-destructs with the same pomp and hysteria as the present. Töre has a keen sense of proportion and its disillusions with respect to the overwhelming ubiquity of advertisements, which regularly sell warped, rescaled images. He is in league with such iconoclastic artists as Claes Oldenburg, who raised the heights of pop-art during its early days in postwar America. “Demonstration” cleverly reinvents the forms of language as its scrambles intellectual comprehension with the chaotic familiarity of misplaced laughter. Every piece by Töre is another universe, an altogether distinct triumph of originality that starts from independent points of creative exploration, though with a certain artistic signature throughout as visible in his thinly penned outlines. “Siege (Big Production)” (2017) was finished in the weeks prior to the opening of the show in mid-November as Töre excitedly prepared for his career-defining solo exhibition. It is a powerful revelation of open and closed space in the virtualized contexts of civilization and history. With a style and effect resembling the medieval patron saint of all contemporary visionary artists, Heironymus Bosch, the piece gives way to his rediscoveries of the American landscape, where he studied in 2014.