Wolfgang Ellenrieder (°D, 1959)
) is a master of camouflage and deception. He leads the habitual seeing patterns of the observer astray while giving a superficial beholder the lunatic illusion of being able to comprehend the pictures swiftly. This illusion of comprehension is the artistic medium – more than mere brushes and paint – that he uses to create his pictures.
Yes, they are first and foremost paintings, but not only paintings. In meticulous detail they speak to us of visible and invisible things, but there is more. In effect, they take advantage of the observer's predilection to strive for compatibility, but simultaneously caricature and confuse. The viewer wishes to correlate that which is seen with what experience says is 'known', but at the moment of assumed recognition the severance takes place – wait, what we are seeing is not recognisable after all (a garden, a tree, a villa in the park, a pleasant portrait) but is a representation of something else altogether.
What task remains for modern painting today but to arouse insecurity in the beholder? Painting has long cast off the academic virtues of expressiveness or a subjective phantasmagoria and is now active in a field which can be classified as collective insecurity permeated by vagueness of perception rather than as an affirmatively expressed curiosity.
Margit Zuckriegl,
Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Loek Grootjans (°NL, 1955)
strives for a high and intense degree of consciousness in his work.
May 1988. Winter past, first days of spring. A studio located on a farmyard, a compartment in an old pigsty. The roof is light-proof and has already been insulated with expanded polystyrene and agricultural plastic. Small gaps and windows have been boarded up and seeled ten times over.
Years of working in dark rooms has taught that eventually the human eye will manage to detect light in every darkness. The ventilation grills can be adjusted by means of strings from a fixed point. Here, there is also a tape recorder that has the largest available reels and is already in the record position so that only the pause button must be released in order to talk to this equipment. Nearby there is a Calor gas stove and a provisions chest with tinned food and dry rice at the ready. And water, just water. No beer, no wine; just water.
No radio, no television. No music. The telephone is disconnected. Only the sound of distance will permeate: the sound of the farmer at work and of the birds who beat the time of night and day. There is no dog nor cat.
The farmer from the farmyard knows nothing of this world of isolation and concentration that has been created here. Moreover, Loek Grootjans is masked when, in that month in 1988, he embarks on this journey through darkness, with the basics within reach and only protected against the elements, blind for the outside, on the way through himself, away from the world behind the eyes, not so as to know but so as to share the activity of the essence of the existence.
In 1988 Loek Grootjans created his own zero point by confining himself during a whole month to a completely darkened room. Afterwards he painted monochromes for years on a row inspired by the red brownish glow appearing on his retina during the period of isolation, and the green haze he saw upon his re-encountering the light. For these paintings he used paint de made himself from paint residue and wall scrapings from his studio. After using the very last remainders the painter had run out of his ‘particular paint,’ forcing him to stop his painting activity. This given was the focal point of the project ‘Final Remains’ (2003/2004, Museum van Bommel van Dam).
Since then Grootjans makes installations and photographs in which the tension between surface and depth – maybe the essence of monochrome painting – is being scrutinized as metaphysical problem, a problem presenting itself in the dichotomy of body and soul, of question and answer, of everything versus nothing at all.
“Site Specific Art – Public Space as Artistic Medium”
Panel discussion in gallery IN SITU on Friday 16/02 at 7 p.m.
Public Space is forever being rethought and it constantly changes according to new ideas on society. Artists can single out crucial problems in these views to be used in their practice. By means of reflection the artist is able to upload new meanings on to the public space. On the one hand policy makers appear to have an increasing interest in involving artists in public space development; on the other hand artists themselves seem to develop more and more interest in public space, out of interest for the fast changing globalising public domain. The artist moves his studio to an in situ workplace in public space, either outdoors or inside, like the museum or other spaces reserved for the arts. And so the phenomenon of the nomadic artist comes into existence, an artist who doesn’t only adopt public space as a new studio but also as a new medium. This calls for new ways of mediation between art, place and public. Two important elements are: the ‘site’ as surrounding space for the artistic activity (conceiving and showing) and the environment as ‘ the medium.’
Reflections on the link between the work of art and the site in terms of spatial, physical or institutional conditions are receding. The site becomes a platform for interchanging knowledge and cultural debate. In their artistic practice artists focus on social, historical, political and even personal topics. These topics come to function as sites for artistic research.
The role of the artists changes from producer of aesthetic objects to the one of a cultural artistic service provider within social, economic and cultural policy conditions. Even if this results in site-specific works of art, these oeuvres come to be detached from their concrete places. The place of intervention and the discursive space diverge. The outcome is a place marked by multiplicity, an ambulatory field in which engagement is first and foremost nomadic. In fact we can no longer speak of site-specific art, but rather we have to understand this as art which can thrive in every possible context, in the sense that the artist often applies the same artistic strategy on various locations.