on Rainer Spangl at Song Song

Rainer Spangl’s paintings are fresh for their lettered material sensibility in both oil and watercolor and because they address conceptions of traditional paintings within the framework of current practice.  In his exhibition Blätter und Kammern at Song Song in Vienna, Spangl selected thirteen paintings ranging in scale from one and a half meters high to 30 cm high, fluctuating between oil on canvas and watercolor on panel.

In watercolor, Spangl assumes a direct observational garden painting system.  His sincerity and craftsmanship are evidenced in the soft ivory surfaces of his wood panels.  Primed with traditional chalk ground, Spangl paints atmospheric washes of blues and yellows and upon these, depictions of trees, bushes, and plants.  Though there are no figures in Spangl’s intimate landscapes, his watercolor pieces carry a liking to post-impressionism’s use of gardens as metaphors for transcendent possibility.

Working with oil paint on canvas, Spangl’s style is indirect.  His canvases vary in size each covered by a unique monochrome of color.  On top of these color fields, Spangl illustrates scenes and objects composed of distinct marks, painted-in long and short strokes, also having a singular hue.  The effect of the limited color interactions is striking.  Likewise, Spangl’s choice of subject matter is equally bold.  The scope of his renderings range from a harbor view on the Cote D’Azure, to a monastery’s library’s 17^th century Venetian globe, to a preserved 16th century whale horn believed to be that of a unicorn.  In his way, Spangl takes on one of today’s most difficult positions, that of confronting conceptions of leisure, the everyday and the role of relics.

The combination of Spangl’s garden watercolor paintings and his op-oil paintings together address not only their subjects, but also the history of western painting.  In that they are paintings, Spangl smartly shoulders credit for that which is in each piece from painting to painting.  There is no accompanying manifesto for there is no need.  They are, each one, knowingly painted on beauty and knowingly institutionally critical.

Song Song, Praterstrasse 11, 1020, Vienna Austria

September 3 – October 9, 2010

- Ezara Spangl

on Luisa Kasalicky at Galerie Nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

Installation view / Login

Installation view / Magazin

A work that Luisa Kasalicky refers to as a unique painting, but what may also be designated an installation, is presently on view at the Galerie Nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder’s Login room.  Provoking a reflection on refinement and spatial armature Kasalicky uses the gallery’s so to speak street level vitrine to distinguish her architecturally sensitive practice.  Kasalicky affects aesthetics suggestive of minimalist design, constructivist drawing and a practice of appropriation.

In the Login, Kasalicky responds to the support, here the shut-in exhibition room.  There are quadrilateral slabs of deep red ocher dry wall with tightly wrapped edges.   Two significant cross shapes made of wood facing away from one another painted green and dark grey sit flat and angle off the wall.  There is a suspended sheet of reflective metal colored plastic.  On which, only a fuzzy glow of light shining through windows may be seen.  Above are two identical purple painted metal three ringed fixtures.  Two brass drapery rods hang vertically just under the height of the ceiling.

Kasalicky’s work at the Login is one of a series, the second of which was presented in her concurrent installation at the Magazin.  In the installation there, the formation of the work is in a nearly symmetrical system.  With elements the same as the piece in the Login, included at Magazin, are cutout drawings made in roofing material depicting chainmail and the design of a manhole cover.  Both works present Kasalicky’s style to mix and often reverse prop with ornament.

That the artist is influenced by Baroque decoration and weapon displays is made clear particularly in the wooden cross works.  Likewise, the three-ringed hook readymades perhaps reference Dada works such as the Hat Rack by Marcel Duchamp.  Though such symbolism is the lead into Kasalicky’s work, her clean approach functions today, as every staple, nail and brush of enamel is knowingly precise.  Each element augments the partly rough matt and partly glam sheen sceen.  It is there, where things cojoin and fragment, titled exclusive, that Kasalicky tells a silent narrative.

Galerie Nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Grünangergasse 1, 1010 Vienna

18.9.2010 – 23.10.2010

- Ezara Spangl

on group show at Ventilazione

Ventilazione in the 9^th district presents a group show of all but one of the space’s members.  Managed something akin to a club, each of the seven artists may hold a solo exhibition and participate in the group programs throughout the year.  Presently it is one of the latter, a diverse mix.

In Josef Zekoff’s work, characters from the Western cinema genre are appropriated portraying dual cores of good and bad.  Ironically, Zekoff constructs a pastiche of youthful infatuation with discerning and tactful self-awareness.  One portrait, painted with oils, a broad brush, and dark hues focusing on a set of eyes and a bandana covered face.  Keeping true to the morality tales, the painted strokes and the composition doubly mark a border defining what is civilized and what is not.  In collage, the combination of deco interior wall paint chips, romantic pale brush marks, and copied movie stills concurrently mark the edge between a delight in a lust for the Wild West and an easy dismissal of this same sentiment.

Subsequent to the book collaboration involving Zekoff and Niko Sturm, a series of heliographic reproductions of photographs hang in thick steel and wood wrought frames.  The photographed images are of the artists, casual in black suits, standing in country pastures with unconcerned white long-horned oxen.  Zekoff and Sturm employ the revered black and white technique of production to heighten the luminance of the images and to underline the tension in the works.  Theirs is a strange working space, based on exposing ego, bond, conquest and fear, in masculinity and in nature.

Other than the collaboration, Sturm shows one painting.  This large piece is indicative of a heroic approach to working on canvas.  Composed of harsh physical movements in paint and paper and applications of metal, the painting manages to depict balance and lightness.  This scarce blend reaches an agreement connecting force with beauty.  Born out of a kind of painting celebrated in the 1950s Sturm fashions his challenge into an easy current pleasure.

With photography Ivo Kocherscheidt portrays defeat and decay and yet for some species, renewal.  Shot in an unfamiliar deep ocean world, the photographs detail a landscape where the implication of a horizon is confused to the point of release.  What is clear in the pictures of this alien environment is the absence of a living human presence, but of a presence of the wreckage of human endeavor.  Rotting ship vessels that have by some means landed on the ocean floor render a cold silence.  Incredibly photographed far beneath the level of standard water exploration, these pictures narrate the end story of some potentially catastrophic end.

Likewise Max Piva uses photography to draw lines in graceful haunting forms and cityscapes.  The conceptual drawings of Florian Unterberger examine the rhythm of the everyday.  Oliver Marceta’s painting of a boxer and an assemblage sculpture effectively augment this compelling exhibition.

Ventilazione, Wasagasse/ EckeHörlgasse, 1090 Vienna

6.5.2010 – 31.5.2010

- Ezara Spangl

on Franz Graf at Kunsthalle Krems

In Krems, the thirty-year retrospective of Franz Graf makes clear why Graf warrants his icon status in Austria and his reputation as role model to many emerging Viennese artists.  Titled ‘SCHWARZ HEUTE JETZT HABE DASS SCHON FAST VERGESSEN’ (translates something like, ‘black, today now I have almost forgotten), the predominantly black and white exhibition spans six large rooms of Kunsthalle Krems.  On paper, canvas, photographs and mixed form sculpture, Graf repeats motifs of text, female portraiture, hands, spines, and plants.  In many pieces he adheres to strict symmetrical geometry in depicting abstract organic forms or record album shaped circles, but Graf leaves open his work to a-linearity and free form composition.  To a greater extent Graf’s handling of his own works alters the read depicting both exactitude with nonchalance.  Particularly, the graphite and ink paper pieces incite the coincident duality of tightness and openness.  In these, white paper grounds hold dense black hardedge graphic forms with apparent unconcern for the surrounding overall fingerprints of dust, chalk and ink.  These smudges and traces reveal, as form-follows-function, that there are many images coming to Graf, but the point is his practice.

Plausibly, the circulation of Graf’s exhibition reflects a reasoning of combining distant themes to locate specific affected sentiments.  In text, Graf uses words as well as the aesthetics of font to emote clear sentences and non-language pictures.  Painted words go from quoting inspirations to quoting himself, as in, ‘was ich davon gesehen’ (what I have already seen) and ‘wir sind nicht gleich’ (we are not the same).  Text also exists as image alone, for instance with gothic letters forming undecipherable words and compositions based on single letters, such as ‘M’.  Faces of women are portrayed repeatedly with graphic details fixed in eyes and rasps of hair.  Some faces appear again and again, one of mention is a woman’s face that repeats in many of the portraits staged as though she is gazing off, somehow over the shoulder of the painting.  In other works, the female portraits seem more distant just as a model from the late renaissance and another, a nude participating in a bondage scene.  The ebb and flow of Graf’s practice reveals conviction of synchronized repetitions but yet marked by decided instances that reveal either moments of changed direction or of portraying a current inspiration.

The ending room of the exhibition is a large space, which has been turned into a performance space surrounded by some of Graf’s found object sculptures, namely out of date muscle building machines that look like small vessels and thrones, an upright piano, scaffolding and one mannequin bust.  A stage is set for music bands from Iceland to perform.  Above the stage hangs a large white canvas onto which is projected a looping color video of stills.  There are two paintings hanging high on a wall, one that is predominantly black with text and one that is white with a concentric rectangle pattern.

Throughout, heavy themes close to trauma, desire, rawness, and relaxation are carried in graphic central imagery.  The materiality and repeating images present determination but decidedly remain unfinished revealing train of thought and thereby finding an end.

Kunstmeile Krems, Franz-Zeller-Platz 3, 3500 Krems an der Donau

March 28 – June 27, 2010

-Ezara Spangl

on Edgar Tezak at Stoob Keramik Werkstatt

Just one hour drive out from Vienna into Burgenland can one view a remarkable ceramic mural by Edgar Tezak.   Presently installed in the Keramikwerkstätte Stoob this expansive work depicts figures and animals engaged in quasi-psychic communications and metamorphoses on muted grounds with vigorous color bursts.  These themes and motifs have reappeared in Tezak’s work throughout his career from the late 1970s to now.  Though here the figures, naked humans transformed with animals, are scaled larger-than-life-size appearing as archetypal characters in a frozen epic narrative.

In parts, the mural alludes to something of a folklore-ish fairytale and something of a Jungian study of the Hindu Upanishads.  However, there is no linear chronology in the piece.  Moments of a perceived story reflect a contemporary reading and the anticipation of the importance in focusing on still moments.  Thereby Tezak undogmatically confers the possibility of analysis in moment viewing the work.

The detail of the painted line as well as the moments of robust color interact easily while conveying heavy relations involving humans, doves, geese, ravens and deer.  Made up by over 600 square tiles, the form of the mural provides an underlying grid serving as the underpainting.  Painted with splatters, throws and sprays of ceramic glaze alongside thin and broad brush painted lines, and then kiln fired, the tiles depict transformation in their conception as well as their collective account.

Keramikwerkstätte Stoob, Keramikstraße 14, A 7344 Stoob

-Ezara Spangl

on Ute Müller at Galerie Dana Charkasi

In a city so sensitive to shades of grey, the ‘Back in 5 minutes.’ exhibition at Galerie Dana Charkasi defines Ute Müller as a uniquely discerning painter working in Vienna.  Showing muted, dark, matt paintings under her particular studio lighting conditions, Müller describes an atmosphere reflective of the city’s established fineness and griminess.  Likewise, in each painting and throughout the full installation, Müller imparts a deceptively easy aesthetic of elegance.

Müller uses her warm grey palette of tempera paint on canvas to build up and also to excavate a central geometric composition.  The ground of each painting is covered in variations of deep matt greys, which are sometimes the result of her painting over and adjusting the surface as she arranges the composition.   Within these grey fields, lighter color values delineate geometric lines extracted from combinations of drawings of objects and architecture.  Müller uses these lines to form numerous and varied angles of perception.  Within the geometric constructions, these views and angles suggest cubism, but by portraying expansive spaces, spaces much broader than the dimensions of the canvases, Müller locates a position of making a re-presentation of classical painting, plus with an inherent attractiveness.

Instead of the gallery’s lamps, Müller mounts her personal vertical neon fixtures to light the paintings.  From these lamps stem winding cables that lay on the floor, a utilitarian form as the artists says she needs the cables to be long so she may plug them into sockets at various distances and to move the lamps around the studio.  In the first room of the gallery is a hanging slotted curtain painted grey, making a chilly though alluring welcome, a pertinent opener to Müller’s works.

Galerie Dana Charkasi, A-1010 Vienna, Fleischmarkt 11, Griechenbeisl-House, 2nd Floor, 10.09. –  06.11.2009

-Ezara Spangl

on Pawel Althamer at the Secession

 

A model example of Anti-art, Pawel Althamer’s piece at the Secession presents an object that is at once revered while also being completely dismissed.  For his installation, Althamer built a tunnel connecting the front main street entrance with the rear exit door of the building’s space.  Making this tunnel, the artist closed off not only the main hall gallery, but also the gift shop and the entrance foyer.  Standing on the original Secession floor, the tunnel is composed of white walls like those of a pedestrian passage through a construction site.   Here the normative expectations of visitors are not met as Althamer completely transforms the institution.  There are no exhibition fees, there are no docents and there are no guards.  In this piece, the artist converted the honored museum into a familiar and mundane public space.  

On the walls of the tunnel are drawings, posters, prints, and graffiti tags.  Althamer invited artists to participate in adding to the visual qualities of the tunnel and also left it open for any passerby or visitor to add their own mark.  With a similar concept but significantly different materials, Rudolf Stingel produced stunning works.  Here, the artist is unconcerned with aesthetics and walls of drawings look like the walls of a municipal toilet. 

In the backyard of the Secession, Althamer’s tunnel is transformed into a theatrical entrance making a stage out of the world around the exhibition hall.   In the open garden, the artist invited others to participate in happenings of music, installation, conversation and theater.  With no hierarchy, remnants of previous happenings and Althamer’s handsomely crafted figure sculptures litter the lawn.  Unlike Allan Kaprow’s ‘activities’ Althamer does not choreograph or dictate his agenda, rather he seems devoted to privileging impermanent institutional critique.

Wiener Secession, Association of Visual Artists Friedrichstraße 12, A-1010 Vienna

-Ezara Spangl