For Art Brussels 2024, ADZ Gallery curates a dual presentation of new works from two emerging Danish artists: Tomas Leth, and Oliver Bak. Working across painting and pastels, it is the first time the two artists have been exhibited in conjunction.

Whilst Leth’s canvases probe the psychological dimension and Bak’s the allegorical, both artists share a corresponding language of pattern and symbol to capitalise on the power of the speculative. At Art Brussels, select works by the two artists will be presented in parallel to create a cumulative enquiry into the boundaries of the known, the imagined, and the liminal. In dialogue, Bak and Leth’s individual practices explore the correlative nature of beauty and existentialism with aesthetic and symbolic parity.

Tomas Leth’s practice is concerned with the twin notions of perception and subjectivity. Using an intuitive process, Leth creates mutable compositions in dappled oil pastel, replete with deep, earthy hues, insistent patterning, and latent references to organic materials. The resultant canvases retain the sense of something half glimpsed or dimly recognised, like a distant memory or a dream vision. Deeply psychological, the artist’s work speculates on alternate ways of seeing. Bearing veiled iconographic references, Leth’s works harbour power from their omission, withholding disclosure and performing chimaera-like, through codification, abstraction, and wrought layers. Leth’s use of language, too, proffers but ultimately withdraws contextualisation, often leaning on ancient, foreign or obscure titling to hint at hidden kernels of reference, humming beneath the picture plane. The works’ inscrutability elicits subjective responses from viewers, recalling Elaine Scarry’s notion of fundamental unsharability.