Rodeo Scene

A true devil child in red trousers, forcing his horse to obey. The child is depicted as a malevolent, power hungry creature who subjugates the woman who raised him and cared for him. Kvium lets a heavy stage curtain glide aside to parade the grotesque rodeo ride before our eyes. The baroque theatrical and staged qualities are accentuated by the colour scheme, in which nuances of red clash violently with their complementary colour green. In his art, Kvium is interested in examining and dissecting the Western world's ideas and, especially, what it represses: He addresses issues such as the perfect human being, the cadaverous, and the grotesque. Here he slashes, with surgical precision, through the illusion of the innocent, blameless child, a delusion that lies like a thin film across our civilised notions about children. And this may be a fitting conclusion to a tour that focuses on children in art: A work of art showing all those aspects of children that artists might otherwise tend to exclude from their depictions.