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2009
drawing:installation
mixed media on paper, wall paint, 7 drawings
250 x 145 cm each, 3.5 x 11 m
Örebro Konsthall, Örebro, SE
The work, which was realized for a group exhibition in Örebro, Sweden, returns to a number of older principles and motifs. The boxes of the title take up the unstable spatial illusion characteristic of the frames constructed in accordance with the rules of parallel projection and related to varying vantage points in VOL.1:DEPARTURE and other works. The flat frame box enclosing a drawing and its illusionistic space, however, has here been replaced by scaffolds of the sort and size used in SPIEL. The volume of these scaffolds has been defined as the pictorial space itself. As in the case of the counterfeit frames, the real pictorial ground is adapted to the shape of the scaffolds tilted into the illusionary space. Two corners of each sheet of drawing paper that would otherwise be nothing but pictorial ground for the figure of the tilted block set into the format have been cut off (the papers, that is to say, are hexagonal). The pictorial ground is thus fused with the block of illusionistic pictorial space.
The scaffolds themselves have been constructed from the round bars used in many works; each bar is the trace of the movement of a brush dipped in paint on both sides. Inserted into their sharply delimited space, whose dimensions (8.1 feet x 4.9 feet) render it anthropomorphic, are various fairly amorphous figures. There are tangled bundles of pieces of rope painted with hard pencil, which, though not always obeying the laws of gravity, respect in their knots and loops the laws of the topological space. Other sheets with drawings in charcoal take up the figures suggestive of polyps and viscera that are part of the vocabulary of GEISTERBAHN, here complemented by more narrative constellations. While the rope figures destabilize the Euclidean space of the scaffold-cage with their flexibility—they appear like molten and shredded replicas of the scaffold that bears them—the open charcoal drawings deploy an illusionistic sfumato even on the technical level, allowing for an interpenetration of space and body. In some of these works, the process of drawing inverts the interrelation between ground and trace. The entire block of space within the scaffold is tinged black and then fashioned into a sculptural but inevitably diffuse body using a vacuum cleaner, a sort of negative airbrushing technique.
The exhibition, part of the cultural event “Open Art,” was held at Konsthall Örebro in the rooms of a former bank building. Before the works were hanged, the upper third of the wall was painted light blue in irregular brushstrokes. With their open grounds, the empty rope scaffolds reflect this ornamental blue color in the bars, taking up the continuous horizon behind the tangled ropes. All sheets, including the more densely filled cages worked in charcoal, which do not take up the blue, are mounted at the same height before this horizon. Their volumes, folded consistently to the left but also upward and downward in alternation, confront the beholder’s unified experiential space, whose structure is confirmed by the horizon running just above eye level throughout. The illusionistic pictorial space, which coincides with the volume of the box that cuts its support medium to size and encloses within itself the macerated and topologically liquefied pictorial figures, is thus confronted with the real space of the room, which is opened by the elementary illusionism of the continuous horizon toward the expanse of a landscape.