For The Armory Show 2026, JOHS presents VEKE, a solo presentation of a new painting composed of seven panels by Norwegian artist Morten Slettemeås. Rooted in the landscape of Gvarv, Telemark, Norway, where the artist lives and works, the paintings emerge from a constellation of images drawn from physical surroundings, memory, and lived experience.

Grounded in the artist’s sustained attention to the everyday and his long-standing engagement with painting as a lived, spatial experience, VEKE is conceived not as a conventional display of individual works, but as a single, immersive painterly environment. Across the booth, the paintings operate in dialogue, forming an installation in which each panel functions both independently and as part of a larger whole. The presentation unfolds through proximity, rhythm, repetition, and continuity, extending painting beyond the boundaries of the individual canvas and into the surrounding space.

For Slettemeås, landscape is not simply a setting but a character: a space through which images, gestures, and fragments of experience come into contact and begin to shift. His paintings move between figuration and abstraction, bringing together scenes, figures, and details within the same composition. Different moments appear to coexist within a single image, creating a sense of time that is compressed, moving backward and forward through memory and perception.

The title VEKE carries this sense of convergence. Across seven panels—a subtle reference to the seven days of the week—distinct images and moments melt into one another while retaining their differences. A recurring horizontal line, evoking the wick of a candle, moves through the presentation as both a visual and temporal thread, further connecting the individual paintings into a continuous work.

Slettemeås leaves his paintings deliberately open. Their meaning can shift with time and with the viewer, allowing personal memories and associations to enter the work. What begins in a deeply local landscape becomes something less fixed: a mutable space in which place, memory, and time continually reorganize themselves, and in which the experience of the work emerges as much from the relationship between the paintings as from any single image.