Maria Kontis, Is there a better example than this?
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.
- Is there a better example than this? (Dyptich) 2005
- Is there a better example than this? (Dyptich)(Detail) 2005
No one can look back on her school days and say they were altogether unhappy 2008
Maria Kontis The distance of adolescence 2008
english