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2009
drawing:installation, charcoal on paper
2.45 x 6.5 m
Rauchsalon, Vienna, AT
After all the birds, angels, ghosts, and clouds, HELFANT highlights a heavyweight motif. The name is taken from an old engraving (Conrad Gesner, Historiae Animalium, 1551–1558) showing a fabulous animal woven together from descriptions and legends; the creature is said to represent an animal. In the small exhibition space operated by the artist Max Böhme in the backroom at Bar Joanelli, Vienna, the elephant appears in duplicate on the two available walls. One elephant on a dark background, drawn in charcoal dust using a vacuum cleaner, stands head to head across a corner with one drawn in charcoal on a white background. Both elephants’ bodies are distributed across two sheets each, with a vertical strip of wall running between the halves. Whereas the works that form part of the series BOXED lock the amorphous charcoal-dust creatures into the imaginary space of the painted cage, in this case the exhibition space serves as the cage for the pictorial motif. The size of the latter, the symmetrical use of two walls, and the distribution of the two sheets of each pair relate the elephant’s body in modular fashion to the dimensions of the real space. The inversion of bright and dark between the two drawings also invites the notion that one elephant is an imprint or contact copy of the other, as though one of the two bodies had crossed the space between the picture walls.