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2009
drawing:installation
wall drawing, mixed media on paper on aluminum, 390 drawings
32 x 24 cm each
Bawag Contemporary, Vienna, AT
The work consists of 490 drawings mounted as a block that takes up a wall in its entirety; they are thus integrated as components into a wall picture. Very thin aluminum sheets serve as the support medium of the drawings. Each of ten rows contains a series of forty-nine upright-format drawings. In the upper right quarter of the total picture, heads seen from behind and depicted in shades of gray predominate. Toward the left, the motif of the heads is gradually interspersed with, and ultimately supplanted by, frames drawn in perspective that are tilted in various directions in space. In the topmost three rows, these feigned frames are painted yellow; in the next two rows, red. The motif of the gaze into an indeterminate spatial depth, represented within the picture by the heads seen from behind, is rendered transparent toward the real space in front of the picture-wall by the empty frames, which direct the beholder’s gaze into the same void. Yet the indeterminate spatial depth toward which the total picture composed of individual pictures opens up is coded by the interrelation between the upper and lower halves. The color blue dominates in the latter. Besides blue moiré patterns, there are fish, boats, swimmers, an accumulation of motifs related to oceans and water, to sailing and fishing. The separation of the upper and lower halves by the continuous horizon and the distribution of the intermittent additional colors blue, red, and yellow quotes, in simple form, the overall impression of a view of the smooth sea with the sky at sunset above it. On a wall to the left that meets the picture wall at a right angle, this horizon in the total picture continues in the form of a simple division into a blue bottom and a white top half.
The installations of drawings integrate individual pieces into a total picture in various ways; in the present case, the pieces serve as building blocks that form a new continuous image-space. The individual drawings enter into this image not as neutralized pixels of sorts, lending nothing but their color value to the picture. The motifs of the drawings—the gaze of the repoussoir characters, the emptiness of the frames, the marine fauna in the bottom half—remain related to their place within the motivic space of the total picture. The elements are thus fused, in a form of very coarse-grained analyzable white noise, into the consonance of the landscape. In a complementary form of presentation, this integration is retracted entirely. A self-published book collected all drawings in a linear sequence enumerating the pictorial elements from top left to bottom right. Book and image, the sequence and its integration into a secondary representation, are on exhibit as complementary forms of how an excessive number of individual pieces is tied into a legible total structure.