Luca Bj\u00f8rnsten makes art that looks like it completely fits with his Instagram username: Nugget Brain. You\u2019d find it hard to believe Luca was born, raised and currently based in Copenhagen given his large output of fluorescent and gleefully childish paintings depict vaporwaved Florida beachscapes. But Luca\u2019s paintings stretch further than mere geography, and become the glue between our present and our fond childhood memories. Primarily working in oil paint, wax pastels and glossy papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9, Luca evokes Harmony Korine\u2019s Spring Breakers if only its Disney stars stayed PG \u2013 like a KidzBop episode of Miami Vice, with a generous dose of childhood ephemera and pop culture excess.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m drawn to the overlooked visuals of pop and internet culture \u2013 meme formats, outdated logos, bootleg toys, awkward mascots, strange branding, and digital leftovers,\u201d says Luca. As well as that, he\u2019s drawn to everyday scenes of gas stations and supermarket aisles, frequent images seen in the vaporwave genre. Luca may not be the first to transform these hauntological images, but he definitely puts his own fun-loving stamp onto it. \u201cGrowing up in the 90s shaped the way I see this stuff,\u201d says Luca. \u201cThat era\u2019s cartoon logic, clunky optimism, and early digital textures still echo through how I build images. But it\u2019s not just about nostalgia \u2013 it\u2019s about recontextualising things we\u2019ve learned to ignore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Luca finds inspiration in channel-flipping and it shows; the visual style in these paintings feel like the 90s garbled through internet passages, digitised and frozen in their luminous pinks. But as well as that, Luca\u2019s heroes include Giorgio Morandi, Fairfield Porter, Philip Guston and artists of the Bay Area figurative movement like Richard Diebenkorn, all similar to Luca in their genre-blending of cartoon and scenic painting. Operating as clip shows of peaceful pre-9\/11 scenes, Luca unwraps our culturally significant objects such as old desktops and VHS tapes like candy wrappers, revealing the sugariness we all yearn for inside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Luca Bj\u00f8rnsten makes art that looks like it completely fits with his Instagram username: Nugget Brain. You\u2019d find…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15702,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-15701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}