Paintings

HEIMO ZOBERNIG

“PAINTINGS”

April 28th to May 31st 2016

Heimo Zobernig’s new paintings are composed of layers of paint with different solubility, oil and acrylic, resulting in a pearling or flaking or craquelure effect. Being explored in the multicoloured works, Zobernig achieves perfection of this effect in the monochromes. The paintings are more about surface than about colour.Zobernig’s most ambitious works have always been either white or black. The latter actually forming his ideal (following the tradition of artists like Robert Ryman or Ad Reinhardt for example).The colors Orange and brown are of similar importance in Zobernig’s oeuvre, although or because often regarded as “no-painting!” colors. That is, our way of looking at the world. By investigating the conditions under which we are able to understand and relate to the world, Zobernig continues the Enlightenment project. In doing so he confronts us with bounds and contradictions – the bounds of our understanding, the opposition between conceptual and phenomenological forms of knowledge, and with irreconcilable, antagonistic systems of representation. Still, even if Zobernig directs attention toward constitutive pictorial processes, they cannot be separated from the paintings; in other words, his linguistic criticism conflates the representation of the means of representation with their utilization. Pictorial devices such as layerings, colors, structures and composition are more than just presented in these paintings; they also generate semantic richness and ambivalent pictorial effects. Thus Zobernig’s projections of constitutive pictorial processes ought not to be seen as universal metalinguistic propositions; rather, they develop from within the processes themselves as visual case studies. Particularly with his new paintings, this procedure is borne by the knowledge that multiple pictorial processes cannot be isolated as single variables and cannot be observed in a single controlled experiment. They assume a new appearance in every picture.

Galería juana de aizpuru. barquillo 44, 28004 madrid. España. T: 34-913105561; fax: 34-913195286. e-mail: aizpuru@juanadeaizpuru.es