Jonas Major

Change the Only Constant!

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Change the Only Constant! confronts the elusive permanence of form and the inevitable rhythm of decay. Conceived as an integrated whole, the installation comprises paintings, rocks, and tiles distributed around a floor painting, and a publication that expands the work into philosophical terrain. Confronting the stubborn nature of material objects with the persuasive nature of canonical forms, the exhibition takes its title from the ancient observation attributed to Heraclitus: that all things flow, and nothing stays still. 

 

Change the Only Constant! does not propose a return to nature, nor a critique of its representations — instead, it stages any nature as an open field of perpetual becoming. In the juxtaposition of image and idea, mimesis and entropy, the exhibition suggests a meditation on perception, time, and the unwavering world of forms (eidos). Rather than seeking to capture or stabilize nature, the installation tracks the boundaries between form and formlessness.

Playfully grappling with speculative propositions, Major’s paintings offer visual inquiries caught mid-transformation — specific objects that fluctuate between material stubbornness and representations of aesthetic ideas. 

 

The accompanying publication made in collaboration with Marius Kunihiko Lunde, Unmaking Nature, presents fifteen axioms concerning the dissolution of forms, together with pictorial fragments and a “geometrical appendix” demonstrating the lawful necessity of decay. Drawing on metaphysics, aesthetics, and classical philosophy, Tenningen’s axioms set forth poetic-theoretical suggestions about what it means to represent nature when nature itself is always breaching into something else.