• Colored crepe paper melts under heavy silicone, wrinkles under glue, cracks under resin.
• Paper forms web-like grids, coloured in pale pinks.
• A mattress pad absorbs spilled paint, leaving stains in rich inky pools and soft gray fields.
• Painting happens, but only to make something dirty.
• It's not a coincidence that Warm Embraces sounds like a brand of fabric softener.
• If household products, like napkins or gift wrap, are designed to regulate us – to use their users – then Kaarstein's repurposing of these materials assumes an almost political dimension, a gleeful refusal to obey, to be neat, to be tidy.
• If protest is present, it is quiet, inverted, secluded.
• His work is more Olai than Kaarstein.
• On one hand, there is an intense longing for the domestic, on the other, a desire to denounce it. Yet, what emerges from this refusal is, of course, an artwork – one that could easily be fed back into the system of the home; Kaarstein makes paintings, and ones that would look great above your mattress-protected bed.

Henrik Olai Kaarstein (b. 1989, Oslo) lives and works in Frankfurt am Main and Oslo. He has been a student at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main since 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Mothers', T293, Naples, 'Isn't', Welcome Screen, London, and 'Charmless', ReMap 4, Athens (all 2013). His works have been included in group shows at Apt 302, Marseille, Clarence Mews, London, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, D'amelio, New York and art fairs such as Art Basel Miami Beach and FIAC. 'Let's Take a Stand That Stands for a While', a collection of his poetry will be published by Britney's press in 2014.

*Extracted from a text by Buck Ellison