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2001
drawing:installation
mixed media on paper, framed, oil on canvas
200 x 130 cm each
color copies, photo wallpaper, carpet
various sizes
Galerie im Traklhaus, Salzburg, AT
The analysis and exposition of the artist’s own pictorial means and motifs has clarified a vocabulary, but also revealed the restrictions of the pictorial system he has developed and demonstrated the need to expand it. This contribution to a group exhibition (together with Nina Mohandes and Eva Wagner) at Gallery im Traklhaus, operated by the City of Salzburg, on the one hand takes the installational integration of pictures one step further; on the other hand, it more fully opens up the artist’s own visual world to the pictures of others.
An ensemble of seven pictures has been arranged to form a wall. Five of the overlapping pictures, attached to a wooden scaffold, are united by the motif of the forest. Two pictures exhibit a collection of contingent traces of the pictorial process: loose tangles of spray-painted lines, trompe-l’œil gestural brushstrokes and their drippings, etc. The forests are formed of branchless gray boles floating freely in the empty white space of the pictorial ground; each bole is the trace of one stroke of a brush soaked with paint at its edges. The motif has broken free of the dense arrangement in earlier pictures and reduced the more amorphous tubes of the protozoa and ghosts’ bodies to a single morpheme that is the trace of the same process of production, now simplified as far as possible. The space of these empty forests—they look as though they had burned down—is deliberately interwoven with the pictorial mise-en-scène of the surrounding space. Most immediately, a bright green carpet on which the pictures stand extends the landscape toward the beholder. Spread over the facing wall is a tableau of heterogeneous pictorial forms that takes up the motifs of forest and wood. To the far left, a photo wallpaper showing a forest has been pasted to a 4 m wide section of the wall up to a height of 1.5 m (4.9 ft). To its right, up to a height of 1.3 m (4.3 ft), follows a faux-wood wallpaper (the transfer to scale of a material, a motif that recurs frequently, in the form of frottage etc.), which continues on the right-hand side short wall, where its upper edge is flush with the bottom edge of a window. Mounted above it, their top edges flush, are pictures in various formats that refer to the forest pictures and their production: a photograph of the wall of the studio with a drawing of a tree, a photocopy of assorted trees from a textbook, a drawing of a brushstroke with paint trickling down, a collage of pages from a book about birds, an abstract black-and-white moiré pattern that contrasts the vertical lines of the boles with a horizontal texture, a face with squinting saucer eyes, an etching by Hogarth, and a serigraph by Ben Vautier bearing the words “Je ne sais pas peindre.”