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2006
drawing:installation
collage, mixed media on paper
3 x 6 m
Centro per l`Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, IT
The motif of the ladder grew out of the tubes, which had in turn originated in the restrictions imposed by technical experimentation with a brush dipped in paint on one or both sides. Rotation of the brush soaked with paint on one side results in the sphere, the soap bubble; a straight stroke of the brush soaked on both sides results in the tube, the bole. The ladders are composed of such tubes. An iconographic leitmotif, they first appear in halbe höhe and rooms fullfilled. The motif creates a simple way of combining figurative solidity with the ‘sublime’ blurring of the boundaries of the image area. The ladders always run in a vertical direction, virtually transcending the frame-function of the image, which guarantees its grasp on a consistent and controllable objectivity. Not only semantically but also in terms of the structure of the image, the ladder can thus be employed as a motif of escape from the space of a reality seen in perspectival vision (i.e., as a counter-motif to the fence). In this work, realized for a survey exhibition of Austrian contemporary art, the motif first appears in isolation. The work on paper, conceived for the rooms in Prato, a wall-sized sheet pasted together from multiple paper webs and ‘installed’ in a corner of the room like mural, is the Dadaistic-magical depiction of an ascension to the heavens in its intermediate stage: a floating scaffold or network of skyward ladders leading from nowhere to nowhere through the blue and white of paper ground and dyed tissue paper; although unmoored in baroque fashion, the ladders still remain the same stalwart objects of utility they are in everyday civilian life.