“Strictly speaking, there are no elements of painting in Geccelli’s pictures. What could count as the most basic building block always proves to be undivided, changeable, instable. Geccelli’s work begins before simplicity, since what is visible is not yet separated and hence not yet brought back together… The line no longer bears witness exclusively to perception, but also to bodily movement… The line is therefore not elementary, but instead a phenomenon of indifference that only afterwards branches into what is seen and what is drawn, into the visual and the corporeal. It is similarly the case with the ground. Therefore, it is much too simple to presume that the ground is a given and stable entity. Without doubt, the painter first levels out and primes the picture medium, but he also paints over the colour lines again with white, to such an extent that their graphical and coloration effects are more or less strongly muted. For Geccelli, then, establishing a ground not only means preparing a surface for the drawing; it is equally important that the drawing can again sink into this ground. The foundation of painting is also its veil… and we also sense the risk of neutralisation associated with the use of this colour. It is precisely this risk that Geccelli seeks: For it alone also allows a new picture to be painted.” (Ralph Ubl, University of Chicago)
Berlin based artist James Geccelli is showing his recent paintings and works on paper.
“ There are different layers of paint on a surface that we call a painting. These specific paintings are a result of an investigation to isolate or claim different periods of time to hold on to an instance of awareness to rescue it from the neutralizing effect of daily life’s continuum . They are moments of perceptions.” J.G.
“And on windy days, one sees how
the wind whirls around the leaves,
even though, as you can see, there are no trees here”
Juan Rulfo Even when we talk about looking at a picture, we do, indeed, when looking at a picture, fall back on experiences previously gained by all the senses with which we see, smell, taste, hear, and feel. The space of the image more or less presupposes a being rooted in real space. A picture resonates with past emotions and memories, with what has remained of the visibility of a conveyed history: a cognition divided in multiple ways. Where is up and where is down, where is right and where is left? A trace can be discerned with the first direction taken. I can follow the trace, it may become stronger or lose itself, get lost, lead astray. If I lose the trace, I search for it in order to return to it. The trace stands out; it shows itself on the picture surface in color and form. The surface is newly divided, a sort of camouflage, old and new traces cross each other, forms hide by integrating themselves in other forms. Orientation settles down between picture surface and picture subject; between real space and image space. Between the materiality of the picture and its effect: showing itself over there on the wall variably from near or from far, from its edges or its center. Between the inside of the image and the borders of its pictorial body, is a density of probability. „Und an windigen Tagen sieht man,
wie der Wind Blätter herumwirbelt, obwohl es
hier, wie du siehst, gar keine Bäume gibt“
Juan Rulfo Auch wenn wir davon reden, dass wir uns ein Bild ansehen, greifen wir doch, wenn wir ein Bild sehen, auf vorangegangene Erfahrungen all der Sinnesorgane zurück, mit deren Hilfe wir sehen, riechen, schmecken, hören und tasten. Der Bildraum setzt mehr oder weniger eine Verwurzelung im realen Raum voraus. Ein Bild ist voll von Echos vorangegangener Emotionen und Erinnerungen, Reste der Sichtbarkeit einer vermittelten Geschichte: ein vielgeteiltes Erkennen. Wo ist hier oben, wo ist unten, wo rechts, wo links? Mit der ersten Richtung findet sich eine Spur. Die Spur kann ich aufnehmen, sie kann sich ausbilden aber auch verlieren, verlaufen, in die Irre führen. Verlier ich die Spur, so suche ich die Spur, um auf sie zurückzukommen. Die Spur setzt sich ab, sie zeigt sich auf der Bildfläche in Farbe und Form. Es kommt zu einer neuen Unterteilung der Fläche, eine Art Camouflage, alte und neue Spuren, die sich überschneiden, Formen, die sich verbergen, in dem sie sich in andere Formen eingliedern. Zwischen Bildfläche und Bildgegenstand, zwischen Realraum und Bildraum, zwischen der Materialität des Bildes und seiner Wirkung pendelt sich die Orientierung ein: dort an der Wand zeigt sich mit dem Bild mal nah, mal fern, mal von seinen Rändern her, mal aus seiner Mitte heraus zwischen dem Inneren des Bildes und den Rändern des Bildkörpers eine Art Wahrscheinlichkeitsdichte.
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The Filmstrip “Mayday” was taken on 01.05.2015 during demonstrations in Central London.
Sigune Hamann Mayday
Sigune Hamann is an artist whose work encompasses photography and video. At RAUMX, the artist presents new photographic work shot on May 1st at Trafalgar Square in London. Hamann focuses on the moment when a common goal directs crowds in common movement and assertion. Film-strip (London 1.5.2015) is part of her ongoing series film-strips, which captures trajectories of bodies and lights in motion in panoramic images. A whole roll of 35 mm film is exposed in an analogue photographic camera in one continuous rewinding movement while moving (walking or turning) herself. In photographic film-strips Sigune Hamann traces the dynamics of urban environments. As a trace of the rally, the film-strip carries its dynamic, memory and emotion.
Hamann’s work deals with the passing of time in the fixing of an image and the perception and recollection of events. As part of her residencies at the V&A and Tokyo Wonder Site she is taking film-strips and testing how they can be displayed and experienced in different architectural contexts. Her solo exhibition ‘In the name of’ at Durham Art Gallery (October 2013) featured a 56 metre film-strip installation. Recent projects include ‘wave’ (Wellcome Collections, London, 2012), ‘Whitehall’ (ISEA, Istanbul Biennale, 2011),’ Stillness and Movement’, (Tate Conference 2010), ‘the walking up and down bit’ (BFI, 2009), ‘undercurrent’ (Kunsthalle Mainz) and ‘short time space’ (Gallery of Photography, Dublin, 2008).
London based artist Sigune Hamann is a reader in art and media practice at the University of the Arts London.
www.sigune.co.uk
One thing at a time. But before I begin to write about Heiner Blumenthal’s pictures, I ought to mention that they are very big – and light. They even look light, because they are not totally covered in paint, let alone a ground, but bear just lines and structures in limited colours, sometimes only in black. As far as transport and installation are concerned, they are pictures – canvas, frames and so on. But seeing them on the wall, one does wonder whether they really are pictures, given their lack of ground and colour. On the one hand, there is the panel painting in its nakedness; on the other, those lines and bundles of lines in their heterogeneity. Not painted pictures, but frameworks and signs assembled on the raw material of the picture. “Scenario” or’,’field of action” is how one might describe the painted parts if that didn’t immediately renrind one of war reporting. So maybe it would be better to think in terms of “situations”. So Blumenthal’s sign constructs are far from being paintings. Yet they would be inconceivable outside the pictures. The canvasses are designated as pictures. The detail is invested with its own logic because it undermines the composition. Illusionism is evoked, yet quite willingly diverts its power of persuasion onto the abstract surface. As if the situational moment were appointing itself to be the picture. “The detours of technology, the linearity of the mind” is how Moholy-Nagy described such artistic incidents. But now we must get to the point, and discuss what is in the actual pictures (the exhibited ones) – if I view the enormous pictures as a kind of comic. I can see scaffolding, constructions, aerials, tentacles and struts. Are we supposed to feel as if we are caught inside huge space laboratories or in a microcosmic chain of molecules? Or should we stay put within the artistic environment of El Lissitzky’s “prouns”? You can never be sure with all these floating “architectons”. With protean energy, they first appear as giant Mondrianesque lattices, then as constructional slogans. Since they keep shifting between a static and a dynamic method, they can never be pinned down as enlarged quotations. What one finally sees is a criss-cross of lines – rather like chinoiserie and trellising – which in the eyes of the dazzled art historian suggest the crossed swords of the Meissen porcelain emblem. Heiner Blumenthal’s way of counteracting the threat of an aesthetically teasing or exalted construct has recently been to introduce scattered blotches which imbue the constructive genre with a certain blurredness, or just simply with life. The result is an org
anic but dangerous balance. For what previously had had the appearance of a framework, now undergoes a metamorphosis into a compactable concertina barrier. However, what looks amorphous switches over to a subversive “basso continuo”. Let’s stop looking for more certainty. The feeling of “entering” already contains all that’s important. Veit Loers (Kassel., 19.2.1991)
Cologne based painter Heiner Blumenthal will show his recent paintings and works on paper
at RAUMX from 15th until 23rd of May.
Private View Thursday 14th of May
from 6.00pm
Open Saturday – Sundays 2 – 6pm
and by appointment – T 020 7267 6267
Lines and surfaces, like racks in flat space. These are constructions, whose purpose lies in themselves alone. But with the exacting necessity of architectural plans. The paintings immediately become part of the room and the wall they hang on. In a way, as if they had always been there, or as if they had been made for the room. They behave like silhouettes or shadows in the room. They have no system and no order underlying them. There are no preliminary models, no studies. Rather, they are themselves studies for possibilities of paintings. This fact of being possible, of balancing out, always remains inherent to them, even when they have been completed as paintings.
The painted lines, spots, runs, edges, the bleeding of the paint, binding agents and painting means come about slowly, abruptly, over highly differing periods of time. Corrections, places that had first been taped, and places that have been painted over are visible. The colors slowly emerge from the lines. Earlier on, these were always very restrained, but in the meantime they are clearer and in terms of color, more defined as individual surfaces. The lines and surfaces end at the edge of the painting, or extend beyond it. The edge becomes the painting border only after it has been stretched over the frame. The surfaces hang in the rack or extend the lines to the painting’s edge.
The complete origin of the painting and all of its material are visible. Everything is immediate and direct. What is not visible is the trace of the painter. No self-expression. No expressivity. It is rather a mechanics of feeling. The paintings are about control and loss of control.
Ultimately the paintings look as though precisely this one could only look like this. As though it is a necessity. And as though as a contradiction of itself, it still bears all its inherent possibilities. The painting is a possible and necessary design at the same time.
Stefan Baumkötter
Suchness/Sosein: contemporary painting and materiality brings together the work of a number of London-based artists in dialogue with artists from Germany and elsewhere whose work explores both the limits and intrinsic materiality of paint, whether through line, gesture or form.
Co-curated by Erin Lawlor and Martina Geccelli
With work by Andrew Bick, Katrina Blannin, Katrin Bremermann, Robert Holyhead, Erin Lawlor, Ingo Meller, Winfried Virnich, Wilma Vissers, Michael Voss.
Preview Thursday 16.04.2015 6.00 pm – 9.00 pm