Melted Plastic & Melted Butter

Various kinds of substances can be mixed together. Some are more hazardous than others. Hazardous substances can be solids, liquids or gases, that may be harmful to people, other organisms, or the environment. Such substances are found in many places: not only in industrial production, but in daily life too. Substances that are placed on the market and have hazardous qualities are required by law to be labelled accordingly.

Tumi Magnússon is one of the Icelandic artists who took up the cause of free expression in the “New Painting” or Neo-expressionism of the early 1980s. His earliest works present a dream-world in which everyday objects are placed in a new context so that their significance and function gain new import. In the 1980s and 90s his works appeared to be abstract, focussing on the interplay of colours – an interplay that is often surprising: at first glance the colours appear to be juxtaposed by chance, but on further scrutiny it transpires that they are not. It is quite clear that the titles and colours of the works reference everyday phenomena, generally in liquid form. And Tumi has pointed out that liquids have no shape, and hence they are abstract, in a sense. In these works we see neither the form nor the shape of the model – only the colour – while the title gives us a clue that there is indeed a model. In this case the models are melted plastic and melted butter.