Texts

For Dario Wokurka @ Neu Köln

In some histories we encounter people or figures who base their activities on the first-hand experiences of other practitioners, like movements upon movements, – with more or less autonomy, tbd, leading to figurative abstractions, optical formations of ideas, projected projects, in that order.

In the show are paintings, done in the last months, while living between Budapest, Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna, employing his parents’ projector and shut blinds. The optimal misunderstanding would be to think of pictures as constellations of visual and conceptual bits. The weave of a canvas as ‘native resolution’.

His paintings perform a parallel movement to a sifting, sorting and serializing of materials, while not being too worried about ‘historical time’. Connecting these materials to previously lonely immaterial counterparts, informative appendices, but focusing on slippages in the translation (distortion, double projections, his painterly dis-abilities). Post relational stuff in almost nostalgic objects of art history’s picky painterly fetishes – a completely inventive nerd, if you like diving.
Lines are done with a brush.

Also: bodily sensations, sets of reps of movements, liquid or crampy, voices manifold, bemoaning, praising, transfiguring, approaching or even holding hostage communal moments of kinship and proximity. Following the lines as they are projected onto the screen, like solitary songs sung too fast – remembering the melodies but not the lines, remembering the lines but not the melodies.

For Fiona McDonald @ Neu Köln

Art history seems like fiction. Somewhere near it: a leaf of spring.

-Phil Collins

What if structures of identity, if looked at too carefully, too closely, would evaporate? Fiona occupies a room not with decisiveness, but is channelling something decisive. We do know that our lose or very concrete formulations, searches, look like decisions in the end, taken-form-phrases, in aesthetics, choicelessly pointing. Fiona’s choices do not drown in, or even scratch camp’s artifice, but seem to have come simply through her poking into, dissecting of, what is closest. Cutting moments out of time, arranging them, requires delicacy, if one were to understand more than the cognitive layers of dear things, and with them questions, moving. She is letting chance in, with humor. Dance in. Humor is one potent ally of distance. Chance with distance amounts to a self reflexive intuition, in this case falling into a simplicity, one that ties a quiet thread between Fiona and us watchers. Observing these sequential observations (film) is its own, surgical, satori.

For Haydee Marin Lopez and Daniel Murnaghan

In the end, to be face to face with bottles, canvas, a self in a tree in Japan ('Lilith', 2018). This two person exhibition by Haydee Marin Lopez and Daniel Murnaghan is what happens when you freeze water on a coated carbon surface and rub it with caesium. A lot of people get burned because they think it is a stone - these people are liquid. Not everyone is, and that raises questions.  For a moment, forget art practices as cultural gaming. Interesting about this exhibition are not the initial thoughts about post-internet aesthetics, Felix Gonzales Torres candy, kawaii, bad painting or Tilmanns' nature loving nurture. It is the honesty, curiosity ('Svaha', 2018, sanskrit for 'well said'), and brutality of a fetus silently crying out for life in the arms of an alcoholic zen monk.  Between walls: Crispness, layered. Crisp becomes crystalline in moments of condensation. Raindrops on windows appear to be randomized patterns acting outside our control. Freezing raindrops become formally increasingly decisive and, formally, itchy. Aestheticuloer. Crispness before condensation is ephemeral, invisible. We are not faced with the familiar split level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. But with a small Korg E Piano, or a shape on raw, unstretched canvas, loosely reminding of Carol Rama's earth bound wall works. Haydee and Daniels motivations to act crisp are related to penetrating fields of content, knowledge and it's absence, cross-platform, systemiculoer. Sex. The topography of past vocabularies just simply doesn't matter after the act.  So to pin the crisp cloud down, to drop crisp things, means to dissolve as much as to collect, to concentrate and then materialize. The light is washing soft and warm. Its breaking through. It's fine.