KRISTIAN TOUBORG

RIPPLING EXCIETIES

ON VIEW SEPTEMBER 13 — OCTOBER 25, 2025

Rippling Excieties, opening in tandem with Danish artist, Kristian Touborg’s exhibition LIVSANGST at Museum Jorn, Denmark, comprises a cycle of fourteen paintings that spans both locations. The exhibition held at CARVALHO, New York, marks the artist’s first U.S. solo show, which opens the evening of September 12 and remains on view through October 25.

Essay by Jeppe Ugelvig

The paintings in Rippling Excieties emerge from the same body of water. In fact, many of them reiterate the same figurative premise: a motif transferred within various states of unrest. Distorted bodies, faces, trees, skies, and pinpoint reflections are framed as inverted compositions by nervously rippling surfaces, throwing them into compellingly irreverent states of semi-abstraction. In lieu of clean images, these paintings offer warped, two-dimensional patterns of light and dark that hover above undefined depths. Some seem lit up by moonlight, fractalized as hard glints of light on water that, by contrast, begin to look almost black. In others, the distinctive synthetic glow emitted from dense urban space, with its hues of bright red and cold white, presses forward from within the canvas, like a screen’s glow in a dark room. In some canvases, Touborg departs from water mirrors to produce irreverent outlines of blending and dissolving bodies and flora, though they share the evidently restless state of their neighbors.

In a feverish tonal range of moonlight blues and purples, Touborg presents nature as a liminal site of figuration that oscillates between scene and dream-state through intensities of light. His canvases are distinctively moody, both terrifying and somehow hopeful, communicated through the active contrasting of dramatic shadow and blinding rays of light, which weave themselves in and through the visible seams that structure the canvas itself. In Touborg’s work, light—from the sun, the moon, from fire, lampposts, or electronic devices—behaves like an actor rather than an effect: it pushes outward from the canvas, holds it in matter.

Bodies of water are the primordial cultural medium of emotion. From the 15th-century Tarot onwards, European visual culture has employed lakes, seas, streams, and pools as allegorical containers of affective intensities, many so abstract or ancient that they go largely unnamed. As an element, water is perfectly metaphorical: its evident material transparency does not preclude it from conjuring all sorts of ever-shifting opacities, tonalities, textures, and hues. Water is change, in the sense that it refuses stasis. Instead, it can (but does not always) mirror the world back on itself. This is true even scientifically: when light travels from one medium to another (air → water, or water → air), it bends because the speed of light changes. Depending on the angle of incidence, some light reflects off the surface rather than passing through it. This bending produces a mirror-like refraction; it also means submerged objects may appear at a different position than they really are, shifted upward or displaced sideways. As such, water refraction is perfectly emblematic of human perception: we never encounter reality directly but only through a medium that “bends” it.

To the Romantic, these are obvious and instinctive registers of human interior life, whose intensive forces channel outward, pressingly, into one’s environment. It is no coincidence that during the European industrial revolution, which produced such profound changes in the human sensorium and models of subjectivity, artists pursued marvelous scenes of nature as a panic response to concurrent mechanical, electric, and synthetic transformations of the environment. In such a crisis, the intensity of modern human sensation overflows into its surroundings, and after this “overflowing,” the human subject can never see nature as/for itself again: instead, it has been seized as a canvas of feeling. This is what allowed French philosopher Gaston Bachelard to write about water so devastatingly more than a century later: “It is near water that I best understood that reverie is an emanation universe; a fragrant breath that escapes from things through the intermediary of a dreamer.”

Touborg’s paintings of water bodies point to the enduring legacy of this cultural sentiment in a new age of excitements and anxieties, caused by new scientific revolutions and a cultural climate of perpetual disaster, which have thrown the human sensorium into flux anew. The titular neologism, Excieties, for the artist, names the overlap where excitement and anxiety are inseparable: dread and desire, horror and beauty, fused in a single electrifying aesthetic pulse. Both sensations are present in each canvas, a dialectic symbolized in the fight between dark and light, visibility and void. Touborg’s compelling approach to figuration is an invitation to map new emotions on new natural and cultural landscapes.

“Whoever looks into the water sees his own image, but behind it living creatures soon loom up,” writes Carl Jung in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959). Rejecting the positivist bent of his mentor, Freud, Jung looked to timeless symbols to aid his therapeutic program. Through them, he argued, we are not only able to figure memories of trauma but to do so collectively—yes, perhaps even universally. Fittingly, the paintings in Rippling Excieties channel deeply personal memories from the artist’s childhood, during which he suffered from frequent debilitating night terrors and hallucinations. But if Jung’s dictum is true, Touborg’s motifs sourced from memory are only semiotic starting points for a deeper affective and psychic interrogation, the atmosphere around signs rather than their direct decoding.  

And this is indeed how the artist works: he begins paintings by rendering figures only to then obscure, warp, or erase them in a cacophony of painterly effects. Here, his practice is in line with contemporary painting, which declares itself earnestly not as a type of artisanal representation in paint, but as the total sum of information registered by gestures on a canvas—brushstrokes, splashes, dabs, smudges. For Touborg, in fact, this begins with the canvas itself, which he leaves not homogeneous and smooth but treats as a surface undergoing constant change. There are areas of canvas thinning from excessive grinding, stitched-together edges, and in the darkest voids of color, one finds small gaping holes indicating momentary total absence. In fact, entire sections of canvas have been replaced by semi-transparent silks, rendering the paintings as plant-like membranes rather than sealed, autonomous objects. Reflective fabric exaggerates the shimmer emitting from the painted motifs, while red, tentacular threads resembling plant or animal life produce inflamed nodes that rest on top of the canvas’ surface as a creeping growth. The frame, on the other hand, appears ancient and bone-like, organically flowing with the brushwork as if sanded by water over centuries.

“I am committed to painting because it remembers the body,” says Touborg. Anxiety and excitements are both sensations of that body: however atmospheric, they manifest in profoundly corporeal terms. The canvases in Rippling Excieties try not only to honestly communicate the state of emotional intensity in which they were made, but transcribe it. As such, they possess what some call painterly “vitality” in that they effectively record the energy of the painting subject, and emit it back to the viewer long after the painter’s body is gone. If the artist’s painted figures are disturbed by ripples, the canvas itself is disturbed by its battered presence in this world. It, too, is a kind of body, and it speaks to us as one.

This adds a new conceptual spin to the Romantic project in that it admits that all images are also objects, and that the materialities of objects are also, in today’s parlance, potentially “triggering.” To appreciate them, then, requires not just looking but a certain kind of extra-corporeal embodiment: to feel the phenomenological register of pain and pleasure, of excitement and anxiety, in something as ephemeral as canvas on a stretcher.

Kristian Touborg (b.1987 in Roskilde, Denmark) holds a Masters from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In autumn 2025, Touborg will have dual institutional exhibitions, held at Museum Jorn, Denmark, and the HEART (Herning Museum of Contemporary Art), Denmark, alongside his first U.S. solo show with CARVALHO, New York. Recent exhibitions include FRIEZE No. 9 Cork St. with CARVALHO, London (2024); Phantasmagoria, LBF Contemporary, London (2024); Fringes of Reflection, Galleri Golsa, Oslo (2023, solo); Merged Echoes, CARVALHO, New York (2024); Vibrant Escape: Ode to Summer, WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong (2023); Dandelion, Newchild, Antwerp (2023, solo); Fluttering The Void, Berlinskej Model, Prague (2022, solo); Trust in Mortals, Brigade Gallery, Copenhagen (2022); Light Blue Noise, Lundgren Gallery, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (2022, solo); Peripheries, Newchild, Antwerp (2022); Bright Beneath, Eduardo Secci Novo Projects, Milan (2021, solo); As We Turn Fluent, CARVALHO, New York (2021); and Soft, Metal, Factory — HEART Collection, Herning Art Museum, Denmark (2021). The artist presented his first institutional solo exhibition in 2022 at Kunsthal Kongegaarden. His work is included in the permanent collections of HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Randers Kunstmuseum; The Blake Byrne Collection; and Statens Kunstfond. Touborg lives and works in Copenhagen.