“Light Blue Noise”, the debut solo exhibition by Kristian Touborg (b. 1987) at Lundgren Gallery opens Saturday 16 April. This exhibition marks a critical development in the artist’s longstanding interest in the relationship between ecological crisis, digital imaging technologies and the complex sensitivities of the human psyche. Raised by a botanist mother and a father who worked as a structural engineer, Touborg’s attraction to the merging of organic processes and man-made structural interventions is almost second nature. His canvasses are immediately recognisable for their sculptural shapes, collaged surfaces and incorporation of recycled industrial materials, however the artist’s main concern is undoubtedly with the history of painting and its contemporary potential. For years he has explored the intersections between Impressionist chiaroscuro and the new ways we have come to understand light as it functions in flash memory data systems and backlit digital displays. More recently, uncanny imagery has come to play an increasingly central role in Touborg’s work and for this exhibition he emphasises the strange and expressive potential of approaching everyday scenarios through a lens of intensely heightened sensory awareness. Within the artist’s studio practice, techniques of both physical and digital labour are seamlessly blended and loop back on each other continuously. Motifs are taken from the artist’s sketches, digital photographs or other source material and are continuously painted, printed, re-photographed and combined with material from previous paintings. The result is a collapse of technical hierarchies and the establishment of an ecosystem of painting where all processes feed into and sprout from one another. Combining sublimation dye techniques with gestural brushwork, Touborg’s unique attention to the layering of pigments injects immense depth into the flat woven surfaces that support his artistic universe. The sense of embedded psychological weight is palpable and many of these works deal with ideas of water surface and submerged subconscious states in a way that speaks directly to modern psychoanalysis. The cumulative effect is that his new body of work reads as a beautifully tactile, maximalist and undeniably disquieting exploration of the way that technological development permanently changes the way our environment exists, and the ways we are able to perceive it."