LOYAL is pleased to present Clear and Present Ding Dong, Jim Thorell’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

A ding dong is a bell. A ding dong is also a fool.

A ding dong is someone capable of hearing one.

The paintings make no attempt to resolve this.

They behave like paintings that have been somewhere and come back with information.

There are flowers in them, sort of. There are branches, sort of. There are patterns that start out decorative and then halfway across the canvas seem to remember they used to be weather. A line sets off as a stem and arrives as a nerve. Nothing stays in its category long enough to be filed. The paintings are extraordinarily complex, yet remain surprisingly light on their feet.

This is familiar territory for Thorell, who has spent years painting systems: root systems, wind systems, tidal systems, the quiet machinery that runs the world without asking for credit. The difference is that the earlier paintings observed these systems with great curiosity, and these ones appear to have joined. The paintings no longer study one system at a time. They behave as though all systems were one conversation, and they have found a seat in it.

Everything in them is signaling. A blossom transmits. A border hums. Small marks gather into committees and disband without minutes. Whatever is being communicated, it is being communicated constantly, in every direction, with total confidence and no translation provided.

The phrase “clear and present” usually precedes the word danger. A warning. Here it precedes neither.

The paintings do not appear concerned.

The paintings appear, if anything, delighted.

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Jim Thorell (b. 1981, Stockholm) Thorell received his MFA from Valand Academy in Gothenburg in 2010. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Professor Daniel Richter in 2009, as well as at Kanazawa University in Japan and the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in Hanoi in 2007. He has presented solo exhibitions at Loyal (Stockholm), Setareh (Düsseldorf and Berlin), Gillmeier Rech (Berlin), Pina (Vienna), Union Pacific (London), Carl Kostyál (Stockholm). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Moderna Museet (Malmö), Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm), Wanås Konst (Knislinge), Vestfossen kunstlaboratorium (Vestfossen), Alma Lövs Museum (Östra Ämtervik), Bohusläns Museum (Uddevalla), among others. His work is held in the permanent collection of Magasin 3 (Stockholm) and Ståhl Collection (Norrköping). He has a concurrent exhibition of drawings, watercolors, and wood carvings on view at Issues Gallery in Stockholm.