Day || Butterfly || Night
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Three memories: diffuse and present at the same time, as figural as they are abstract, naive and yet determined - colorful, nostalgic, expressive and playful. In the form of three large-format paintings, they form a foundation, the backdrop for what is in the foreground, for what is present, just as memories for the present.
Inspired by Kathryn Bigelow's film of the same name, Strange Days explores the fleeting nature of our earliest memories and at the same time addresses the omnipresent desire to preserve everything fleeting and temporally limited. Created in a continuous work process guided by intuition, the expansive installation combines painterly works with sculptural elements that are almost architectural. The large paintings are juxtaposed with sculptures. Made from cold, inorganic materials, they form rigid, dystopian structures, perhaps vessels in which memories - things thought, felt, experienced - are supposed to find their place. The intended act of conservation, of fixation, has a hardness, almost a brutality to it, that is reflected in the materiality and texture of the objects.
 
The space creates a fundamental tension of contrasts, between heat and cold, organic and inorganic materials, between amorphous and crystalline structures, color and monochromaticity, hardness and softness. But the clear juxtaposition, which also seems to follow the different artistic disciplines, breaks down again and again when components and structures are found in the individual works that carry the qualities of the apparent counterpart. A flower that grows from cold metal; remains of earth; floral patterns in the cracked glass - the delicate interplay of seemingly opposing materials gives the sculptures a further level of complexity and builds a bridge to the paintings in the background.

 

The connecting element is also the sculpture made from salt dough, modeled on a human body (the subject of memory?), whose dynamic and performative character as a potentially deformable and perishable object is only selectively undermined by the preservative effect of the salt. Like the tree on which it is mounted, it appears to have become a fossil, but at the same time it seems to be stuck in a process of disintegration and transformation. As in the recurring butterfly motif, this reflects the fundamentally transformative nature of memories.

Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Mehrzwecksaal Semperdepot, Vienna

Oktober 2023​

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Text: David J. Wimmer

Folder Design: Franz Tiefenthaler
Photos: Manuel Carreon Lopez