Althuis Hofland Fine Arts is pleased to present the third solo exhibition by David Noro (b. 1993, Denmark/Italy) at the gallery. The exhibition Cards for sentiments brings together paintings, watercolours, wall paintings, and a large-scale installation.

David Noro’s practice can be understood as a digestion of daily life encounters. His work often begins with what is close at hand: archival material, personal experience, or fleeting impressions, which he transforms through processes of layering, erasure, and reinterpretation. The works inhabit a necessary uncertainty, shaped by doubt and reflections on personal experiences with social phobia. This undercurrent lends a quiet vulnerability to the exhibition, where images oscillate between intimacy and distance, presence and disappearance.

For the exhibition, Noro draws from the personal archive of his grandmother, illustrator Ann-Lise Drescher. Her work, originally created for greeting cards, napkins, and gift wrap, was designed for circulation rather than preservation. In Cards for sentiments, these motifs return as both material and conceptual backdrop.

The paintings in the exhibition suggest collapsing states—physical, psychological, or structural. Decorative elements appear throughout the works as fragments detached from their original context (summer dress, book cover, gum wrapper, patterned bedsheet, handwritten notes, chipped wallpaper, frayed fabric), debris. Or perhaps they are interiors, spaces that reside within.

Noro has created an installation developed over two years, composed of collages, textile works and archival fragments. Through processes of layering and erasure, earlier images are almost entirely obscured, leaving faint traces beneath the surface. Memories, thoughts, efforts, stories, erased. This ongoing transformation emphasizes process over fixed outcome and allows the work to remain in flux, shaped by time, audience, and context—a ghost that settles in the space.

The connections between the works arise from a transformative tension, a dialogue between stillness and what lingers beneath it. They suggest its influence is unfolding slowly, like an undercurrent. The past doesn’t simply sit behind us; it gathers in the present, drawing us inward, even as we move forward, carried by it in ways we might only recognize over time.