Dusseldorf´s galerie t proposes a vision of extremes and contrasts with revisited tendences in the tradition of the historical avant-garde like Constructivism or Expressionism. The selection fluctuates between figuration and abstraction, with a strong commitment to experimentation, whether technical or thematic, questioning boundaries and established conceptions.
A proposal where painting and drawing are the main features, with five defined but related aesthetic positions. Faced to the volatility of the real and the strength of fiction, the five artists rely on topics such as individual identity, urban landscape or to pure geometry.
The artist Stephan Guillais recalls the human figure in an existentialist reflection with a strong imprint on his expressionist painting, while Xan Medina points out the infant and adult body as an epicenter of fragility in his drawings-paintings on paper. Rigourus geometry is set on Norbert Thomas graphics, paintings and reliefs in constructivist compositions allowing chance to play a major role; meanwhile Olivier Catte builds anonymous metropolis in its serial and ortogonal dystopian macro-landscapes. Last but not least, the monochrome abstract paintings made by Alessandro del Pero testifies certain urban loneliness and despair.
Stephan Guillais / The flesh on the wood
The work of Stephan Guillais (Caen, France 1975) is rooted firmly to a corporeal nature surrounding the issue of personal identity. The body glimpses as the core and generator of this oeuvre, as its primary vehicle of reflection and action, with the addition of a kinetic intention trying to catch the movement of their models.
Interested in the notion of the physical as in the possibilities and limitations of the human body, Guillais´s representation states the individual in a psychological rather than a cultural context. His predilection to describe intimacy in minimal or exultant body experiences make this work a statement of strong humanistic sense.
Based on a complex process of meditation and action, this work reminds a palimpsest, where the image emerges after several additions and rubbings to evoke psychic relations. The artist obtaines these images with a characteristic technique: covering wooden racks with generous matteric-oil layers, to later „draw“ on them as in the way of a xilograph printmaking. With a sui generis tool like a paint scraper, the author digs this surface making traces of strong linear gestuality, to repaint it over afterwards.
In emphatic moments of this process, the author creates compositions in which their models fail to become captive in deep, intimate spaces. It may be said that this creative process demands a highly physical work in order to bring up the image, an image in which the author also stresses the backgrounds. The figures tend to be absorbed in a dense and tense environment which is baroque and obsessively carved to capture emotions succesfully somaticized.
Xan Medina / Lost People
Xan Medina´s drawings and paintings (Barcelona, Spain, 1965) also appeal to a narrative centered on the human figure, with child and adult models performing a controlled melancholy as distinctive sign. This humanised world addresses to some fantasy genre, in an effort to examine, to make the viewer feel the existential drama of these characters.
The structures of line and color allow to expand sensations and emotions due to a rich technique, near a cutting lyrical expressionism. His paintings are lavish in formal and technical experimentations in which chemistry plays a fundamental role, by altering the color in delicately overlapping spots. Ink and water produce textures that insist on settling a state of drift, threatening the physical and psychological limits of these soulless beings.
The thematic issues of this work describes disturbing emotions, guided by a strange beauty that seek to connect in the tradition of the absurd and the grotesque. Something that could be defined as an unsettling gaze, pointing out to this observer of the human condition that is Xan Medina.
In the attempt to get familiar to these characters, we raise the suspicion that they are loaded necessarily not only of intimate, but social identity. A clue to approach to the dramatic weight they carry, realizing the battle won by fiction to obtain authenticity, even more than reality itself.
Norbert Thomas / Random meet the order
Norbert Thomas´s oeuvre (Frankfurt, Germany, 1947) is based on the geometric constructive possibilities given in the bi and tri-dimensional plane, in a variety of formats such as painting, sculpture or relief. Composed of pure chromatic masses, with a strong organization form-background, this aesthetics is focused on the rhythmic interplay of serially connected and expanded elements.
The progression of items such as volumes, lines and angles are remarkable in his forms which stand out or hide into the wall. The reliefs bring as well another optical possibilities: they loose off the wall, making the shadows activate a deeper perception, like if they were floating or taking off.
The intensive use of non-colors like white, black or gray combined with a cold or warm works on paper and painting, refering to the universal goal of Constructive Art to give up any content significance towards visual values like form, rhythm or color. Meanwhile in his sculpture, the sourrounding space is extremely stressed by the palette, address to formal values like harmony, tension, contact, similarity or balance.
Thomas´s sober compositions would also reflect the need to escape the control and calculation through ludic estrategies. These are works that exist in a compositional asymmetry, in an apparent anarchy used to build their strategy however supported in the number or the grid: to enable random meet the order.
Olivier Catté / Metropolitan Mysteries
With a characteristic work centered on the city seen as an overview labyrinth, Olivier Catté (Petit Quevilly, France, 1957) builds his macro-urban landscapes appealing to optical illusion. Organizing an orthogonal space structure, this iconography suggests the social alienation of modern metropolis, with its buckets, cells and prisons.
Catté makes appearing blocks and plots tearing, piercing and painting cardboard, contrasting negative and positive fields as a distinctive technique of his work. His constructive plan lies on the axonometric perspective, supported on the suppression rather than the addition.
The light and shadow´s display lead the eye to a fantastic urban architecture, often stripped of scale. The cardboard itself recalls the consumption, the packaging of merchandises of our society´s use and abuse, but yet offering his last service: a new life, a new visual reality.
In this urban panorama stands the ability to observe this architectural geography edges, rennouncing to any punctum or center in favour to the margins or periphery, assuming the whole image as a pattern grid. A device that is not just unreal, and that through the gaze´s transforming power, Catte writes as an abstract narrative where the city is by itself, a story.
Alessandro del Pero / The loud silence of the city
In the paintings on canvas and paper made by Alessandro del Pero (Bolzano, Italy, 1979) in his recent New Yorker stay, it is possible to witness a transcendent twist on the traditional figurative and chromatic artist's career. The series entitled Wired is composed essentially by monochromatic fields in bright and dark textures crossed for black lines.
To watch this territory without further references undress, perhaps, to the realm of personal experience at the time to suggest realities like the information traffic through cables. Cables which connect this global village but as well spy its digital users. Location without coordinates but tangible; a wall in which the painter leans against as a reference point to understand a dangerous loneliness that is not just imaginary.
The artist explores these „no places“ where emotional and physical realms overlap and intersect in fear and anguish. Confrontating metropolitan life in an apparent absence emptying and formal resignation. The background has a major presence here and not only in a complementary way; it's cables, these cross signs that cross and explore enroll.
These dark cables, with its beginning and end delimit areas and up to recognize and offer a look not so distant and abstract, specially with. Del Pero reflect in these paintings the negation of the visible, facing the last stronghold of the form still with melancholic vitality. Cables to which we must look to see fully know, even at the risk to loose access.
Fernando Moure
Köln, October 2014
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