Conversation between artist, gallerist and curator

Ancient Games, the ancient game of “doing painting”: twelve oils on view in Milan, at the gallery ProjectB, narrate how to pour a story into a gesture, the personality of the artist, the freedom of imagination of those who enjoy and observe that gesture.

Two hands appear against the backdrop of a green forest; paint and brushstrokes depict the instant between sleep and waking, while profiles of familiar figures move on a distant horizon, the place where the kingdom of Tom Anholt is born.

Forest Games is the first large canvas one encounters entering the gallery, the work the artist places at the heart of the show. But immediately, through the long optical cone of perspectives seen in the space, a sequence of parallel universes appears, works dense with references and layers, never equal to each other.

Jane Neal: A path in which the signs of the hand of the artist remain evident – sanding, cuts – but also errors, for a style that is hard to categorize, between the Gothic and Expressionism.

Emanuele Bonomi: What I have always liked about Anholt’s work is the unpredictability of what he paints on the canvas… no work is thought out a priori.

Jane Neal: Tom Anholt feels like part of that generation of post-Internet artists that can be inspired simultaneously by nearly the entire world of knowledge, from Medieval art to historical and religious themes, all the way to contemporary paintings, thanks to the immense archive provided by the Internet for instant access on the computer in the studio.

Tom Anholt: Painting is an ancient game, a way of bringing to light this knowledge and my story.

Carlotta Loverini Botta: Is your production a personal dialogue with the work, or is there something precise you want to communicate?

Tom Anholt: I look for a balancing point in my paintings. If the story I want to tell is too evident, or on the other hand too open to any interpretation, without reference points, the work is less interesting. Observers have to be able to read their own story, but within certain limits suggested by the work itself.

So the exhibition as a whole suggests a path, the starting point and, after having gotten lost among the works, a way out, the path to a possible future.

The work precisely captures that balancing point, towards perhaps a more abstract path and towards Sicily, our island laden with light, where Tom dreams of opening a studio.

Carlotta Loverini Botta