They come as pretty simple pictures, images that are flashes settling in the field of perception. But once they’re lodged in, they also look next to themselves, displaced, washed out, squashed, fleeing almost, as if they were performing their own presence. But those apparent deferrals are no escapism, rather pictures that have a quality of motion, or the luck of seeing something at the right moment. MARSEILLES, ILLINOIS is like hitting the replay button repeatedly, mapping the distances between one work and another, the time it takes to move from a picture to the next, gauging the intensity of their emotional reservoir. The works therefore give a kind of side-eye, a distanced feeling of anonymity that contributes greatly to the emotional build up.
Rico Weber’s gray reliefs made of cable trunkings house numbers or fetishistic objects like the domestic Christian cross dresses the mundane with the veil of a magical and ghostly presence, like mummified bodies in alchemical transformation. His television sets are similar remembrance pieces: taken back from his travels in the 1990s, they were filled with layers of images coming from Japanese TV, race cars, with the thrill of speed and danger of trackside fires, or news bulletin and images that recall the topical mediatized war and images of horror: unheimlich schön. The cathode-ray tube technology of those bygone television sets still shines bright, extending the reach of the analogous space into an ever-delayed image. Against the immediacy of the flash, this captured light takes its time, settles in more fluidity, maintaining its effects, offering its luck thirty years later.
TV and painting both work with signals, as shown in Elise Corpataux’s June 18, where the emotionally charged surface produces the picture, as did CRT technology (Cathode Ray Tube). Here, the painting points towards an energized field, as if it was signaling a charged-up potential to ever be present, or towards the field of immediacy so dear to painting. Seen through a car window, the scene is built up with a sense of anonymity that helps the painting move alongside its electrified field, stretching the gap between sentiment and sentimentality. The “Greetings From” painting similarly leaves its exact location open-ended. Together with its nuclear and pastoral codes, the sense of destabilization points to the structural conditions in which it is read and to its affects, since the nuclear and the postal both are aesthetics that circulate well. There is an embarrassing sentiment glued to their anonymous character as the biggest picture of the exhibition reads: locally hated for all its need of self-affirmations.
Asta Lynge’s Chef Bouche sculptures take on the humanized stove character in Disney’s 1991 Beauty and the Beast, their first animation film to feature multiple fully computer-generated environments, notably the one of the grand ballroom. Scaled, stretched or squashed, they are redistributed throughout the space like vectorized bodies, changing proportions to fit the scene, as if the exhibition was built in stop-motion, frame after frame. Disassembled and reassembled, this re-articulation shapes a rhythm inside the motion picture, durational sculpture conflating times into a new immediacy. The flashes in MARSEILLES, ILLINOIS move in sequences pointing outwards, not because it is never enough, but because immediacy comes with an understanding of capture. Thus their staging of delays of attention, works that are repeatedly replayed in a new light, or the billowing sentiment of a candle-lit atmosphere of a CGI made ballroom.
Paolo Baggi
Rico Weber’s gray reliefs made of cable trunkings house numbers or fetishistic objects like the domestic Christian cross dresses the mundane with the veil of a magical and ghostly presence, like mummified bodies in alchemical transformation. His television sets are similar remembrance pieces: taken back from his travels in the 1990s, they were filled with layers of images coming from Japanese TV, race cars, with the thrill of speed and danger of trackside fires, or news bulletin and images that recall the topical mediatized war and images of horror: unheimlich schön. The cathode-ray tube technology of those bygone television sets still shines bright, extending the reach of the analogous space into an ever-delayed image. Against the immediacy of the flash, this captured light takes its time, settles in more fluidity, maintaining its effects, offering its luck thirty years later.
TV and painting both work with signals, as shown in Elise Corpataux’s June 18, where the emotionally charged surface produces the picture, as did CRT technology (Cathode Ray Tube). Here, the painting points towards an energized field, as if it was signaling a charged-up potential to ever be present, or towards the field of immediacy so dear to painting. Seen through a car window, the scene is built up with a sense of anonymity that helps the painting move alongside its electrified field, stretching the gap between sentiment and sentimentality. The “Greetings From” painting similarly leaves its exact location open-ended. Together with its nuclear and pastoral codes, the sense of destabilization points to the structural conditions in which it is read and to its affects, since the nuclear and the postal both are aesthetics that circulate well. There is an embarrassing sentiment glued to their anonymous character as the biggest picture of the exhibition reads: locally hated for all its need of self-affirmations.
Asta Lynge’s Chef Bouche sculptures take on the humanized stove character in Disney’s 1991 Beauty and the Beast, their first animation film to feature multiple fully computer-generated environments, notably the one of the grand ballroom. Scaled, stretched or squashed, they are redistributed throughout the space like vectorized bodies, changing proportions to fit the scene, as if the exhibition was built in stop-motion, frame after frame. Disassembled and reassembled, this re-articulation shapes a rhythm inside the motion picture, durational sculpture conflating times into a new immediacy. The flashes in MARSEILLES, ILLINOIS move in sequences pointing outwards, not because it is never enough, but because immediacy comes with an understanding of capture. Thus their staging of delays of attention, works that are repeatedly replayed in a new light, or the billowing sentiment of a candle-lit atmosphere of a CGI made ballroom.
Paolo Baggi
