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Andreas Seltzer, untitled from the series "Die Hitze in Paris", 2012
red, yellow, green, black and blue ink on paper
copyright by the artist, courtesy Laura Mars Grp. | | |
Tina Born´s installation RADIANT CASANOVA revolves around the phenomenon of Giacomo Casanova (1725 – 1798), who late in life wrote his memoirs which were to win him global literary fame posthumously. The approach to Casanova’s life and work resembles the entry into a caleidoscopic mirror maze. Apart from a confusing edition history, pirated editions, distorting translations, censorship, and selective editions, from the very beginning an irreconcilable conglomerate of authenticity and fiction, stylization and myth, condensation and simplification engulfed the original character. Thus Casanova’s memoirs not only testify to an ego’s self-contemplation, but are by the same token, in the course of further examination, for each respective era a projection plane, an expression of zeitgeist as well as an agent reflecting the reader.
A follow-up to his storyboard drawings based on William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), Vitek Marcinkiewicz now adapts the adventure feature LOHN DER ANGST (Le salaire de la peur / The Wages of Fear) by Henri-Georges Clouzot (b/w, 1953). The plot is that of four men who get the chance to haul, for 2,000 dollars each, highly explosive nitroglycerine on two trucks across three-hundred miles of bumpy roadway. This time the breakdown of sequences into single frames performed by Marcinkiewicz does not promote, other than his work about the film by Friedkin, an analytical perspective on the artful framing of action elements; here it serves to create an ever tightening arc of suspense that sweeps from the promise of happiness all the way to utter doom.
Andreas Seltzer in his works on HITZE IN PARIS (The Heat in Paris) picks up on the record-breaking heat wave of the summer of 2005 to draw fantastic plans and therein imagine a meltdown of the city’s structures of order, yet one that also fosters insight into the history of revolts large and small, into grotesque incidents, erotic complications, and everyday disasters. (On occasion of the show also a print release of “Die Hitze in Paris” by Fantôme Publishing Berlin will take place.)
„Some books have pictures, and some pictures have books“ (Ronald B. Kitaj). British artist Suzanne Treister’s work HEXEN 2.0 (Witches 2.0) comprises veritable libraries: her own art-historical research, medical and sociological studies, investigations into psychological warfare, into the fields of propaganda and politics, into the development of artificial intelligence, and into the belief-systems of occultism. From this she has molded a universe of magical combinations, where delicate drawings are united with hermetic diagrams, alchemical formulas, cabalistic symbols, mirror images, and para-scientific pictorial finds: a universe which points at the fact that what is called “black magic” has lost none of its eerie fascination. |
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