Artists: Sebastian Dacey, Inga Danysz, Dorothee Diebold, Ørjan Einarsønn Døsen & Hannah Levy
The exhibition ‘TRANSITION’ deals with delineating the terms figuration and abstraction that still function as opposing binaries. On the one hand visual imageries manifest, which appear to engage in reproducing reality in different ways, operating on the other hand in a non-figurative, putatively autonomous pictorial space. The picture as an heteronymous product not least owing to the context of art has thus established itself as an object of cultural production.
‘TRANSITION’ has collated the works of five artists. Figuration and abstraction should not be seen as mutually exclusive categories but as a simultaneity intrinsic to the act of seeing. We find ourselves in a third space; forms could constitute objects or cease to be figurations and images could renounce their figurative status in favor of an abstractional potentiality.
The works of Inga Danysz can be identified both as objects and images simultaneously. Painting parameters dissolve in her works to brim over and reflect their zero point, coalescing in their state of being completed as a pictorial object. Danysz’ works often depict a nothingness that due to consistency of form holds the potential for them to forsake their status as self-referential abstract images. Aluminum, silicon, white, yellow, moon. The forms of her pictorial objects by dint of their geometrical reduction can be latently identified as symbols without, however, revealing their content. Danysz adds another zero point to the discourse on painting: that of the depleted icon.
Ornamental and organic structures often form the point of origin for Sebastian Dacey’s paintings.Dacey interprets his micro and macro world view through the medium of painting, developing it around the substance of an artistic process and deconstructing the homogenous and recurrent into individual protagonists. On the actual surface of the painting medium they appear to lead a life of their own with the trauma of logic being the cause of their existence.
Over and over again we find identifiable elements that are embedded in abstract structures in Ørjan Einarsønn Døsen’s paintings. Pages of newspapers that have triggered an idea for a painting are marked in Roman numbers. Media events appear greatly alienated, shining through, situations are discernable without resulting in clarity. Døsens Duktus skillfully dives into the different formal categories of the periods of art history. At times he is reminiscent of the “Junge Wilde” (Young Wild Ones) of the ‘80s, the paintings on exhibit at ‘TRANSITION’ may be set in much earlier times. It is difficult to pin down the time of the events in Døsens paintings and the drawing material specific to the period seem to dissipate into the medium of painting.
One gets the impression that Hannah Levy’s objects refer to their functionality although the objects on exhibit are divested of it. It is through this very state of unredeemed functionality that Levy can deal with the object’s relation to its functionality in artistic terms. The objects become the protagonists of their function and seem to use themselves as they are meant to be. They stand, squat or crouch in the absence of their use. In doing so Levy takes the reverse path of Danysz. The objects abandon their status as items in favor of a self-reference of their form.
Dorothee Diebold’s large paintings comprise of sprayed gestures and imprints of haptic surfaces. They illustrate in the most literal sense of the word. Archaic application of paint material and a subsequent dabbing with decoratively designed papers demonstrates for one the diametrically opposed handling of the -by itself meaningless- paint material. For another, Diebold thereby records a synthesis of the performatory processes of order and destruction in the pictorial space. In generating images Diebold draws from the layers of meaning inherent to the use of color, culminating in the purely image related polarities of artistic gestures.
Text by Marcel Hiller
