Luca Bjørnsten revels in the sugariness of pop culture in these luminous paintings

Luca Bjørnsten makes art that looks like it completely fits with his Instagram username: Nugget Brain. You’d find it hard to believe Luca was born, raised and currently based in Copenhagen given his large output of fluorescent and gleefully childish paintings depict vaporwaved Florida beachscapes. But Luca’s paintings stretch further than mere geography, and become the glue between our present and our fond childhood memories. Primarily working in oil paint, wax pastels and glossy papier-mâché, Luca evokes Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers if only its Disney stars stayed PG – like a KidzBop episode of Miami Vice, with a generous dose of childhood ephemera and pop culture excess.

“I’m drawn to the overlooked visuals of pop and internet culture – meme formats, outdated logos, bootleg toys, awkward mascots, strange branding, and digital leftovers,” says Luca. As well as that, he’s drawn to everyday scenes of gas stations and supermarket aisles, frequent images seen in the vaporwave genre. Luca may not be the first to transform these hauntological images, but he definitely puts his own fun-loving stamp onto it. “Growing up in the 90s shaped the way I see this stuff,” says Luca. “That era’s cartoon logic, clunky optimism, and early digital textures still echo through how I build images. But it’s not just about nostalgia – it’s about recontextualising things we’ve learned to ignore.”

Luca finds inspiration in channel-flipping and it shows; the visual style in these paintings feel like the 90s garbled through internet passages, digitised and frozen in their luminous pinks. But as well as that, Luca’s heroes include Giorgio Morandi, Fairfield Porter, Philip Guston and artists of the Bay Area figurative movement like Richard Diebenkorn, all similar to Luca in their genre-blending of cartoon and scenic painting. Operating as clip shows of peaceful pre-9/11 scenes, Luca unwraps our culturally significant objects such as old desktops and VHS tapes like candy wrappers, revealing the sugariness we all yearn for inside.