Maria Kontis

Pictures are not everlasting, as the “rethorizing” apocalyptic post-modernists would like. Old painting conservators know that, curators know that and photography historians know that too. The materiality of paintings exposes them to aging, introduces termination just as  inevitable as our bodies introduce into our existence. Materiality is what makes paintings extremely delicate.

Maria Kontis leads this gentleness, this illustration of passing time to the extreme. The pastel drawings of photographs play with the concepts of distance: of time, emotions, and that of the medium itself.

Directness, in all its complexity undergoes reflection. The impermanence of the technique, the fading of the pictures, shows all too well the influence of passing time. The careful actions of conservators, the fixatives, it is all for nothing. One after another the layers of pencil will inevitably lose their saturation and fade to greyness, like spinning bicycle wheels.

The division in this “ready made” of contemporary painting sphere is fundamental. Titles-comments visible underneath the paintings confirm this distance. They are cool and ironic,   and not without charm and tact, which, as we all know, bases on the distance coming from gentleness.

Maria Kontis (1969) lives and works in Australia. In the last couple of years her works appear regularly in  Gitte Weise Gallery in Berlin.

A couple of days ago I received a discreet, yet urgent invitation to Studio Gallery.

Having passed a thick black pall curtain, I stood surprised in the middle of a very trendy crowd. I was faced eye to eye with no more and no less but the recently deceased Mr. Damien Hirst himself. He was just standing there, although ?floating? might be a better term. In the centre of the room smelling slightly of formaldehyde (or whatever it is taxidermists use). Indeed, he was there, I witnessed it with my own eyes. Pickled, just like his shark. The great shark of British art.

We have heard about this sort of thing before. The eccentric British gentleman, who donates his body to an academy on the condition that it will be mummified. The mummies in Southern Italy, standing in graveyards, dried by the wind. Baroque reliquaries, inside which the remains of saints are held, thanks to the art of taxidermy and frivolous sculpting.
A few moments later I was sipping my wine, sharing the crowd?s strategy, seemingly the only one possible - to look without noticing, smiling politely. Meanwhile, my brain was undergoing peregrinations through conceptual hell.

He was standing there in golden boots. Golden Wellies. Both erotic fetish and aristocratic memory of victory.

Dressing him this way, Aleksandra Hirszfeld is performing an usurpation. She steps in someone else?s shoes. Like Cinderella’s sisters, to see if the glory of someone else with suit her. By imitating his strategy (the baroque pickling) she is trying to fill in for him in the art market. To take his privileged position there. Also to show how uncertain scheming like this is. The price tag in his hands is like a family jewel.
It is nothing other than repetition. Art, however, does not fall into such categories as originality in the same way as fashion or advertising.
With golden boots Hiszfeld turns Hirst into something like Danton’s head from Roussel’s Locus Solus. A network of nerves floating in “soave”, silently mouthing its own orations. Endlessly stimulated by a hairless cat. Death is unimaginable to any living creature. This is just a puppet is reduced to its own brand.
In the last scene of Satyricon we witness a reading of the will. Eumolpos, the poet, leaves all his fortune to those who will eat his body, since they devoured his soul while he was still alive. The said fortune is a lie. It exists only in the trusting minds of the alleged beneficiaries.
I fear that pickled Hirst might encounter the same problem as his shark. It turned out that the formalin solution was too weak, and the noble beast?s carcass began to rot. So they had to exchange it.

Studio Gallery, Hirst in golden boots, Aleksandra Hirszfeld, 10 april 2010

What appears after an explosion? The image of the world after the flood, Europe after the rain or a fresco by Uccello. The inspiration by not-really-top shelf movies is visible, although there is a bit of Tarkowski too (Stalker, The Mirror). And it is not just, as Benjamin stresses, human inclination to perceive their times as the times of crisis and the end of civilization - every époque sees itself as the decadent one, even the ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs to say that all had been better in days of yore, even tomatoes had different taste, not to mention the cucumbers. Even Cato used to say that the world would soon end, Rome stinks, and the traffic jams make it impossible to get anywhere.

The search for happiness in a person’s private past, and the bitter experience of losing it on the political level. It is both an evaluation of the doubtful results of revolution, and an attempt to penetrate that particular space of rapidly growing freedom. Which is a space of magic as much as it is of horror. Analogical to contemporary times since the French revolution. We try to look into that ambivalent space through a dirty membrane of imagination. It seems like we are locked in our past life form like in a room made of two-way mirrors, screens from behind which future (or present) looks at us like Borges’ mirror creatures. Hence the fantasies of the absence of the human race, visions of Dante’s basso loco, the vestibule of the unthinkable. Kleczewska has shown us those silent observers in the last scene of Marat/Sade.

The association of a meditative space with an ambivalent ruin, but a construction at the same time, is exactly what links the series of exhibitions. They all enter the peculiar space where forms permeate each other, and which is ruled by paradox like Lewis Carroll’s space.

Heart of Darkness

Looking at Rafał Milach’s pictures in Yours gallery I could not get the novel by Conrad out of my head. “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” The black sea of concrete exists on two levels. One of them is quite clear: a failure of the Soviet style colonialism, the ruins of the terror of reason. The tracts of concrete spat by Ukraine today. The same Ukraine that used to spit corn and fortunes as a victim of our native colonialism. The fact that our slaves were actually white is no excuse.

In one of the photos the sea hitting the concrete breakwater seems to be just a reflection of the concrete ocean. Just like in the surreal landscape with a shepherdess with old  blocks of flats, like mammoth remains, in the background. The second game which appears here seems to be taken out of Magritte’s paintings. Several tools are at play. The most visible is painting, the heroic, romantic XIX century marine and landscape painting, and the Russian realism. The said landscape with a shepherdess has been put in a heavy gilded frame. The composition and format of portraits imitate those of gentlemen officers from the navy or, one level down, Russian realism. One of my favorite works is the first one we see, a photo wallpaper hung on a gallery wall, which is a photo of another mural displaying idealized seascape. Its colour, faded in the sun, makes you think of the Mediterranean Sea. The dominating feeling about it is surreality. Similar to Tarkowski’s landscapes, which he made surreal with long sequences. Or to one of Calvino’s invisible cities reflected in the lake, on of many searches for happiness.

The association with Conrad, that I somehow cannot exorcise is about the same action: to show the heart of darkness present in the civilized by means of a small correction of display. Conrad’s monstrously long sentences have similar effect as the romantic documentation of the abandoned, post-apocalypse space. Baudelaire would be glad, it is like from outside this world, where people hate nature so much that they got rid of every last sprouting plant.

The Black Sea of Concrete, Rafał Milach, Yours Gallery

The porn star stare

What catches my attention in Bujnowski’s paintings is the meticulous mimetism of the paint layer. Those huge canvas almost look like they are cast in concrete. Just like the one luxury housing estates and modern office buildings are built. The eye sockets from the title are darkly glimmering empty windows of an unfinished building. A ruin and a construction at the same time. The Derridean topos of recording and erasing is realized here. It has something of the cabalistic world of layers to is as well. The resistance of matter effect, a malicious coincidence. It also generates associations with a knows series of photographs portraying a very Polish architectural topos. Unfinished houses, the symbol of the first capitalist years failure, a glimpse at the better future of the 90s.

The eye sockets have a look of disappointed hopes. But not only. It is a look of a porn star. Bujnowski is not hiding that the materiality of his paintings, their physicality is what constitutes their essence. It is the kind of painting which as medium does not disappear in its message. Which is called “pure means”, or seems to be it. A painting shows itself instead of disappearing in what it portrays. Cinema historians found it new and disturbing in Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1952), the moment when Harriet Anderson, the leading character, suddenly looks straight into the camera lens. Bergman himself considered this the first time in the history of the cinema when a direct contact with the audience was established. Later, pornography and journalism trivialized this method. We are now used to the porn star looking at the camera while doing what she has to do, which is like she is more interested in the audience than her partner. It is also, like in the case of the ruin, pure architecture, a modernist dream come true - architecture without a purpose. Existing only virtually, not polluted by resistance. A comparison with The Ruin by Monika Sosnowska comes to mind. My suspicions are confirmed by the paintings from The Fog series, where architecture and space become a blur, as they are absorbed by the greyness that looks like the neutral background for spatial visualization programs. A similar effect is achieved The Gambler, where artifacts without a function, but with a strong suggestion of one, familiar and strange at the same time, without a material reality, become just a semblance on its own.

The Eye Sockets, The Fog, The Gambler, Rafał Bujnowski, RASTER Gallery

And what if I were crazy for heavy industry?

The exhibition at Asymetria gallery completes this strategy of stripping the forms off their function, making them selfless.

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Esthetic detachment of the function, a simple action, yet very attractive visually. The exhibition makes a good impression, the way of expression of the photos is modern, but at the same time a just a little bit fusty already. They are the kind of nostalgic photos people do not take these days anymore. Except for thousands of Warsaw academies students, as a form of exercise. Which is not a sign of depreciation at all, it is more of an ascertainment of the change in our modernity. Tadeusz Sumiński, through his photos, turns a factory into a dreamworld, full of surreal, abstract shapes. Its amplification is the latest simplicity in architecture, a modernist dream and, as we shall soon find out, a rather toxic one.

Factory and Form, Sumiński, Galeria Asymetria

Wall-e at Raster

Nicolas Grospierre elaborates on the subject of the ruin-mirror resonance in the times of instant architecture. An illusory winter garden appeared inside the Ciech building (built in the 80.; soon to be put down due to growing concentration of asbestos). Closed in a glass cube it is the last remnant of life in the space destined to die. The idea is as if taken out of a disaster movie, but it definitely moves my poetic side. In the heart of the upside-down pyramid, one of the icons of modern architecture, a winter garden surrounded by two-way mirrors. Nature, reproducing itself visually and virtually projects its reflection on the dead realm, inside which it is trapped. Grospierre has built a thrilling catopticon, an image of a monad multiplying layers of space.

Like Olejniczak, Bujnowski or Milach, Grospierre has created a specific kind of time, a stopped continuum. The present which does not have the past, and the future is not constant, but sort of a bag for crushed present dreams. After all, monads do not have windows, but half-transparent screens at best. That time, that endless existence is confronted with the inevitable moment of destruction, the dismantling of the building. The inevitable destruction of that space, however, is necessary for the time-space experience.

Sadly, there will be no Eve coming to console us and save us from the post disaster loneliness.

Glass Trap, Nicolas Grospierre, RASTER Gallery

Terrible citizens, do androids dream of mechanical landscapes?

Terrible flats. In terrible flats/Terrible citizens lead terrible lives.

Aleksandra Urbańska in crimson silk dress is a wonderful hostess, tactfully introducing her guests to each other and showing them the best perspectives to admire the paintings. Galeria A?s current exhibition is worth stepping by for this pleasure alone. An intimate room, a modest display, a daylight landscape, a nocturne and two fractals.

Maria Szkop, the author of the paintings, sets abstractness against the figuration of artistic pose. It is an anti-formalistic strategy, very rightly called by Tymek Borowski* the New Bourgeoisie. Rightly, because this name suits the new group that emerged among art consumers. The new middle class. Marta Szkop?s works deliver to those new consumers of symbolic goods everything they search for. Repeatability and anonymity of technique, while making it very individual, adjoin a particular vision of Nature. It is Agamben?s saved night of nature**, which reaches homeostasis through a quiet suicide of the human kind.

The vernissage is not a documentation of this strategy, but rather a display of its side effects. We can assume that there are two reasons for hiding the act of production. The obscenity of the work in progress itself, as indicated by Slavoj Žižek. It is not a coincidence that villains? hideouts tend to be places of constant, frantic work. Which brings it close to an act of terrorism. It could also be coming from the theatre of painting and drawing, the anonymity of a craftsman, like the disappearing immaculate Hertirze factories in one of the plays by Pasolini.

However, a grain of parnassianism is inherent in the whole thing. In a traditional way no less. Once, Degas and Paul Valery went together to see an exhibition at the Salon. They were admiring a tree, painted with utmost care, with its leaves as tiny as parsley. ?This had to be terribly boring to paint?, said Valery, which angered the great painter: ?Be quiet! if it wasn?t boring it wouldn?t be a work of genius!? Something of that constant tension between hard, back-breaking, mind-numbing work, and its intoxicating effect remains in Maria Szkop?s works. Same characterises academic exercises and studies by Leonardo or Rembrandt. The problem is the technique, or its level. Precisely, its technicality, the regularity of needles, leaves, dabs and spatters, the way each of them were attended to separately.

A scary nonsense grows layer by layer,/They move about the jungle of events like ghosts.

Two of the landscapes are characterised by fractal regularity and no less regular twists caused by the limitations of a human hand (which to the author seems to be as interesting as the creation of a landscape). Like among Szczerbowski?s works, here we find a clinch of the natural and the mechanical, the organic and the technical. Nature, undergoing a process of mechanical reproduction, overgrows the canvas like a parody of life, a mockery of its force. A connotation with flowers created on windows when it?s freezing is very adequate. The trick and the key to this travesty of life (and reason) was displayed by Thomas Mann in the first paragraphs of Doctor Faustus. The quartz flowers imitating heliotropism via chemical mechanics, the shells covered with random patterns, so deceivingly resembling the signs of forgotten alphabets, finally the buzz of the big bang, in which for years now we?ve searched for the message from the Other.

This is the source of the suspicious tranquillity emanating from those kitschy stills. It is the world which is a parody of the world as a logical universe, a thoughtless an sterile repetition. The saved night of nature is Nature free from meaning.

This peaceful and boring repeatedness leads us towards the source of art mentioned in the title of the exhibition. Towards beauty. Only they forgot to warn us that the beauty in question is of mathematical nature, as in the first part of Kant?s Critique of Judgement, the beauty of which the best example is the soothing repeatability of wallpaper patterns. It becomes employed as a weapon against pure kitsch, those moments of existence which, when captured, always look somewhat amateurish.

We are convenient witnesses to the catastrophe which quietly happens within our sensorium and in the depth of the canvas. It is an act of reactivity. Silent ostracism touching the aesthetics of sublimity. Apollo is a cruel and vengeful god. In this ethernal petrified ?now? (like the world in Marsyas?s howl), the space of a fairytale, of virtual picture, of the mockery of eternity, a man is not possible. He is too meaningful. Although gods do live in harmony with their nature, this is not classical at all - it is a manifest of the production process mechanics, and not the result of being against loud mediocrity.

Just like Mariusz Tarkawian?s production a kind of prosthesis of social services in art world, Maria Szkop is a prosthesis of postcard-like pictures, sleek like chromolithographs. It is submission and resignation in the face of overwhelming means with no end and no goal. Though not without grace, and certain courage.

Like mold and soot it crawls down the wall/ The winter terror, the dark agony.

Looking at the daylight landscape with a lake, however, I wonder what that mysterious elevation of the lake shore is. The one which seems to protrude from the water surface? That shadow, that as-if-on-purpose badly painted reflection, that stumble bringing to mind the dissonance between a vision and its representation in practice? Is it a shore of a deep down secret, silent water run deep? An error disrupting the manner of representation, thus suggesting another way in which those landscapes exist? Tymek Borowski suggests that they exist just like nature, not its representation but repetition, not a fake but something both more and less. I do not know if it is not too much hope, or naivete. Still, that shore intrigues me, slanted in such uncomfortable way. Its naivete is at least suspicious. What would it conquer? The dissonance between the imaginary and the produced?

Katarzyna Kozyra?s In Art Dream Come True*** is an impressive nightmare-project about that dissonance between the imaginary, disegno and the realisation. Personally, I am closer to the presentiment of horror coming from the urban dream of solving all kinds of tensions. The timeliness of beauty seems more like an unhealthy happy ending. To me, those paintings are like snake eggs, where, although underneath a milky membrane, you can distinguish the reptile’ s shape.

*

Galeria A
**

Agata Bielik-Robson (2008),”Na pustyni”- kryptoteologie późnej nowoczesności,Kraków, Universitas, str. 402 -423.
***

Katarzyna Kozyra, Teatro Municipale in Trento, Włochy; Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 2003-2008

]]> http://foppreview.com/?feed=rss2&p=533&lang=en http://foppreview.com/?p=83&lang=en http://foppreview.com/?p=83&lang=en#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:46:36 +0000 fopp http://foppreview.com/?p=83

Breughel Senior had the habit of studying landscapes and works of art upside down. To achieve the desired perspective he would stand with his back to them, and then straddle and bend double, so that his head dangled between his legs. That little eccentricity of his is told to have killed him. Death, in the shape of cerebral haemorrhage, found him in that very position. His behaviour, however outrageous it may have appeared in art galleries, is in fact metaphysically justified (to those who would like to explore the topic I recommend the Phenomenology of perception). What appears after the inversion is not just the world upside down, just like an inverted image of a face transforms into a grotesque masque with two slimy balls surrounded by stiff cilia in place of a mouth, and an obscene moist chasm leading deep inside the dark mysteries of a human body right where a forehead should be. The other face of art, appearing after just a minor interference with the position of a work itself, that nonetheless changes the way we learned to look at it and make it safe, evokes my constant interest. The minor interference I am talking about could be introducing an economic, philosophical or political aspect, or even a decent intellectual analysis, when we are dealing with works which are fashionable, but of doubtful value. Incredible how many works and rituals of art the latter can throw completely off balance.

The texts presented here are intended to function in a similar way as the Breughel?s method. This is the intended purpose of the commentaries, interferences and polemics. The same purpose lies in the choice of the discussed works. The majority of them will have been created or exhibited in Warsaw, which of course is not an assumed restriction, but a coincidence and a starting point. I will not try to avoid showing what I like, be it the young and the unknown or the old and renowned masters. After all, the main purpose of this blog is pleasure, hence my unwillingness to compromise, and my incorruptibility. After all, we all have our little eccentricities we would hate to give up. And personal taste, while being subjective, still claims the right to be universal.

Asks Audrey Hepburn in the cult film. Same question comes to mind when you attend the painting degree show 2009. The importance of this question lies in its tone.

You can sense the works of young geniuses, however immature they still might be. Above all, they reek of talent. What was shown at the degree show 2009 of the Faculty of Painting reeks of good grammar, learned syntax, the influence of many well known and carefully studied paintings, the respect for small but active master professors. Salieri from Forman?s movie might as well ride down the corridors in his squeaky wheelchair; the prophet and patron of mediocrity. The spooky castle, which is what the Painting Faculty has been turned into, is now full of all kinds of horrors ? from unintentional pastiches of the works of professors? and local celebrities, through dreadfully serious pseudo impressionism attempts, bordering at the level of those amateur masterworks you can find in the Old Town or at a flea market on a Sunday afternoon (hall on the 2^nd floor), to the parody of Spiral Jetty ? conceptualism basing on the lack of concept of any kind (the first couple of rooms on the 1^st floor), amateurish photorealism examples, and epigone studio creations. This exhibition is a valid test telling us exactly how camp we are, basically there is no other way to protect ourselves from these fallen academic daubs.

There are two exceptions, both of them extreme. The first one (leaving a very good impression) is a set of works by Sabina Błażejowska, who, unlike her peers, made the effort of mastering her technique and, what is equally important, she puts some thought into her creative activity. Her works are carefully thought out in detail, conceptually coherent and rich. They are divided in two parts, paintings and new media art works. Both are focused, very appropriately in the light of the exhibition as a whole, on the self-sufficiency of a part in a mass, one in a series. The paintings, referring to photorealism in technique, were put together in one block. It is a series of medium-sized paintings, featuring stylised shoes, which thanks to the artists technical skill get a new meaning, on the one hand they become an excuse for showing off with it, on the other hand - an elegant allusion to Truth in Painting, as well as to the classic van Gogh?s shoes analysed by Heidegger. The positioning of the quadrangle paintings in a seamless block without any neutral space between them makes us perceive the whole thing as an abstract painting composed of figurative elements. Similar experiments, definitely bringing to mind pixels creating digital pictures, were conducted by Szczerbowski. My personal interpretation comes straight from ?This is Not a Pipe?, only instead ?Campbell, Campbell, Campbell? I would write ?Converse, Converse, Converse?. A transition from consumption to mysticism has a certain charm.

The second part of the portfolio, in New Media, is not disappointing either. It consists of several sets of small sized pictures ? frames from Sabina?s films ? put together in lines. This time the sets are separated by single white frames which gives a certain regularity to the composition, as well as helps present each set of frames as an entity of its own. This is not the only effort taken to make the frames self-sufficient within the series, the titles, carefully printed and stuck underneath each single one, perform a similar function. Perhaps it is the author?s response to the frozen frames by John Mekas.

Her works, interpretational fertility and visible proficiency in conceptual code aside, have one more quality worth mentioning, that is visual beauty ? so scarce throughout the rest of the exhibition.

The other exception is a perfect example of the kind of fraud that conceptual art enables. I am talking about ?A Man?, an installation by Paweł Sysiak. In “Obieg” (Polish art magazine), Adam Mazur wrote: “I will not attempt a description, let alone an analysis of Paweł Sysiak’s work, my apologies to the author and our readers. It is just very complicated, apart from a sheet of paper with professor Tarasewicz “painting” a completely different picture installation. Let us accept it as a part of some in-studio discourse, a settlement with the tutor. Surely the two of them know what it means.”

Well, somehow I do not share this certainty, I am rather aware that someone is trying to beat around the bush here, but what, about what? I see a great amount of fashionable buzzwords, admittedly gracefully arranged into something that is supposed to look like an artistic dialogue, but nothing more. More importantly, despite being somewhat erudite person, I cannot decode Sysiak?s riddles and ideas. Perhaps the way it is displayed is wrong. I still do not know whether the installation should be looked at in full light or in the darkness, with only a couple of position lights; that I got both opportunities during the exhibition? The way objects are put together evokes strong associations with a hardware store catalogue. The way of interpretation following Monika Sosonowska’s works, the only one that seems adaptable while looking at the installation, makes Sysiak look like an ordinary epigone. Perhaps it is the fault of the lack of text of any kind; during the MA defence the work was introduced by the author?s extensive presentation. What is puzzling, is that without this parergon, it is beyond interpretation. How many scraps of fashionable theories does the author have to throw at us to enter public discourse? I do hope the case here is not the same as with the paintings by Sławomir Pawszak, whose theories that go with them never fail to bring a lot of joy in the faculty next door (that is the Faculty of Philosophy), as delicious caricatures of phenomenology. Until I get my hands on that parergon, I cannot help but consider this work a stylised presentation of bathroom elements referring to Kobro?s aesthetics, acceptable maybe at Industrial Design but definitely not at Sculpture.

The dependence of art work on the discursive aspect directs my thoughts towards supervisors and art dealers, and what follows, towards the final question from the same cult film: Do you think she’s handsomely paid?