Far sounds

Far sound. Noises. Echoes. No long-distance operator needed, self-transmission instead. What’s to hear? Five voices, telling, communicating. Possibly.

Grape juice, cans of Coke, beverage containers, books, photo reproductions placed within gloomy spots upon white canvases. Fabian Ginsberg’s paintings seem like nocturnal still lives. But in fact, they are dissecting tables. He counters and opposes the idealized, contemporary commodity aesthetic with analytical coolness. As if he painted in a refrigerator with the door closed. The image of the commodities (and thus also the painted image) is dismembered and then reassembled—until the implicit becomes explicit.

Any landscape or plant, nature itself, has to be disinterred and dislocated in order to withstand upon a painting. Painterly, it has to be invented anew. Ann Katrin Hamm does just that. Figuration fades in and out of appearance. (A dragonfly?!) It becomes snarled in transparent washes, harsh superimpositions, facetted colors. Ornamentally, mere gestures and structural elements collide and swirl like records, eyes or breasts, like flowers, vines and tendrils. To behold the world, look within the painting first.

In a bold fractal shattering, Simon Hemmer disintegrates his colors from all motival constraints. They themselves are theme, form, space and movement. Almost like musical compositions, his absurd topographies, mosaics and tapestries generate geometric as well as organic patterns, constantly permutating and morphing into waves, freeways, staircases, rainbows, stars and grids. Audaciously hinting at the haunting (»Green Goblin«) and subsequent expulsion (»Ghost Busters«) of the so-called modernist myths.

Tenderly, Yuji Nagai tends to his pictorial gardens. Almost indecipherable, foliage is pervaded by stems and branches like veins or spines. The touches of color radiate outward or thoughtfully circumscribe themselves in densely interwoven fabrics. At times gracefully agile, then again porous and rather dry. Underneath the green, reds and pinks, warm ochre and orange hues shimmer—as if there was a melancholic feeling of autumnal futility like a forgotten Nike of Samothrace. For what’s to win these days?

Online, today’s hypercomplex world appears immaculate. Chase Wilson, messes up the machinations of these meticulous presentations with lyrical realism. Be it tangled headphones sabotaging their usage, flowers revealing life’s impermanence or LA street scenes twitching with insecurity, all smoothly flowing productivity comes to a halt. There’s a palpable silence to his paintings. Like cinematic stills he envisions a fragmentary present, in which we strive and ever-fail to connect like an unwavering maneki-neko cat.

All in all and after all, far sounds up close.

Christian Malycha.