Roulette, Variable Painting 1966

Oyvind Fahlstrom’s ‘Roulette, Variable Painting’ is like a game of chance played on canvas, or maybe it's a puzzle daring us to piece it all together. I can imagine Fahlstrom in his studio, shuffling images like cards, cutting and pasting, building a world of strange juxtapositions. What was he thinking, placing a photo of a crowd of faces next to a picture of an ape with a tag around its neck? It’s a madhouse, a collage of our collective imagination. The different images are layered, and the relationships are open to interpretation. It feels almost Dada in its sensibility, but with a modern, pop art twist. Fahlstrom is in conversation with artists like Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters, but he’s also talking to Warhol and Rauschenberg. Ultimately, ‘Roulette’ is a reminder that art doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to make you feel something, even if that something is a delightful sense of confusion.