Carousel

2022–2024
gel pen and acrylic spray on paper
470 x 180 cm 3 parts, each 150 x 180 cm
acrylic spray paint on PVC
approx. 180 x 89 cm

At my first job, I was in-house at a print company with this old pro copywriter, a guy named Cherry. And Cherry told me the most important idea in advertising is ´new´.
Creates an itch.

You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. He also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate but potent. Cherry told me that in Greek, ´nostalgia´ literally means ´the pain from an old wound´. It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.

The device you see here isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards... It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel. It’s called the Carousel.
It lets us travel the way a child travels, around and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

After Don Draper in ´Mad Men´,
Season 1, Episode 13
´The Wheel´,
2007