Thorsen Kurséls paintings function like rigged inkblot tests that seduce the viewer with visual phenomena raising questions about the nature of consciousness, reality, and perception. Rigged because unlike the venerable test, the artist is the patient, projecting their own experiences and subconscious thoughts onto a blank canvas. The viewer is not creating a dream of their own but appearing in the artist’s dream as a welcome if not vulnerable interlocuter.
Kursél utilizes pernicious western painting traditions to respond to contemporary realities and envision our genuine future selves. Influenced by the supernatural, political satire and literary criticism he uses paint as both material and metaphor encouraging pattern recognition, pareidolic readings and a deep curiosity from his viewers.
Lending a verisimilitude to the images he paints, Kursél employs an improvisational method of artmaking anchored in the formality of paint, gesture and mark making. He collides surrealist automatism techniques with traditional painting construction using these collisions to generate bricolage creatures, surprising narratives, and eccentric characters. The artists’ figurations are abstract to a point where they appear familiar, even haunted in the same way that forms become mysterious at twilight.
Exploring personal and cultural memories, biases, and desires, Kursél resolves his compositions with an intense sense of order belying the unstable, changing nature of the images encountered. Through this process the seen and the unseen intersect, not as opposites, but as reflections of a shared human impulse: to find coherence in chaos, to impose structure on the formless, and to recognize something familiar within the unfamiliar.[1]
[1] The Rorschach Test and Abstract Art. Psychoanalysis in Art 05.03.2025