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2002
drawing:installation
ink on wooden planks
2.8 x 3 m
Steve Mathewson Studio, Vienna, AT
On the occasion of a Vienna art event called “Soho in Ottakring” that has taken place annually since 1999, concerts, performances, and exhibitions are held at Steve Mathewson’s studio. In several years, Harald Hasler built and operated the bar used during these events. In 2002, the wood that had previously formed the fence of GET LOST was used for one side wall of this bar. The boards have now been arranged horizontally, painted white, and finely polished so that the grain of the wood reappears in the form of a lamella-like structure. On this wall, a white image area has been delimited, to which a delicate brush drawing in three colors and three layers of acrylic has been applied: the graphic abstraction of open and wet brushstrokes in blue, green, and orange. As in WIRL, the fields in which these brushstrokes are inscribed are slightly misaligned with the white ground and with each other. Moreover, the paint that trickles (or rather, seems to trickle) down from the imitation brushstroke runs vertically downward in the green layer, horizontally to the right in the blue layer, and obliquely to the bottom right in the orange layer, as though the layers related to different centers of gravity, i.e., as though the support medium had been rotated. Amid the three layers of color, between which this rotation introduces a temporal distinction as well, there is a detail the beholder is liable to overlook at first glance: the several pairs of circular blanks that have been left untreated. They transform the sweeping colorful brushstrokes into the drapery of ghost costumes billowing in a strong wind.