Allan Haverholm: When the Last Story Is Told

“When the last story is told, its absence rings with colour: Shapes & structure linger”– Like the clap of thunder when the air rushes to fill the vacuum from a supersonic plane, Allan Haverholm poses the question: When the last story is told, what fills the space it leaves?”

In the latest book by visual artist Allan Haverholm, narrative gives way to another order of meaning. Although the pages are divided into comic book grids there is nothing to constitute a traditional story, or even pictures in a sense that one would expect. The only text in the book, quoted above, frames the 60 pages of minimalist colour compositions alternatingly obscured with bold strokes of white paint and abstract, black textures.

The book questions one of the basic elements of our culture: storytelling and its underlying structures. Its very title suggests a potential end of narrative, but also that something else may fill the gap, a still-fluid substance or undefined fictional construct forming after this universal aphasia. Like a message from an alien mind, When the last story is told is loaded with meaning encoded in an undecipherable language.