BENNY DRÖSCHER ‘LURKING FOR TRANSCENDENTAL MOMENTS’ BY DANIELLE ADMISS FOR FREIZE
Benny Droscher’s work can be referred to as ‘points of view.’They embody perspectives as an assimilation of ideas, and at the same time, they return to previous moments. There are many levels of integration that resonate in Benny Droscher’s practise and none of which can be deduced by valued judgements.
The works presented to us at Rokeby gallery, London, spill over from painting, drawing, and sculpture, and into dislocated narratives. ‘Lurking For Transcendental Moments’ plays with meaning, the production of it, and the notion of appearance. In Droscher’s world the earth is forever spinning in its orbit and always either turning towards or away from our perspective.
In works such as ‘Lurking For Transcendental Moments 5’ (2007) or ‘The Beneficial Beauty of Lurking (a)’ (2007) a correlation is played out that includes differing gestures and mark making from silhouettes, detailed trees, and pencilled deer, to negative space, block coloured disks, and dark and detailed night sky’s. Brightly coloured they stand out against the white background. In dream like sequences reality is not a constant it is elusive and easily undone.
In ‘With My Head Bent Auspiciously Over The Centre’ (2005) two furs rest on the floor and are held in place by puppeteer’s strings. In turn, the strings are garlanded with large bright gold stars and are attached to a tree mounted on the wall. The feeling of vertigo induced by the title of this work – the uncertainty of how one can place the self in its description, questions the stability of subject in relationship to object.
The tree appears to be a reality. My eye is drawn to the actual wood, an implemented material in its construction and a signifier of its own falsehood - I am thrown back to looking at the furs on the floor. How disturbing they are. How disturbing this is.
Much of Droscher’s work operates in this way. Breaking down the methods of production-process-meaning will only lead to labyrinths that coil into dead ends.
We, as viewers can see that here illusionism confronts representation and renders it redundant. Ushered to where reality begins to unfold itself and lost in its own contours is where Droscher’s practise begins to become an ellipses’ of representation and language.
It is not so much the references or quotations that Droscher uses that are enticing in his works, although the play of representation and appropriation infuses the pieces in this exhibition with a conscious essence of inspiration and absurdity - both in good measure. Instead, it is the illusion that draws the viewer in; the illusion he represents as a certain ‘reality’.
The sculpture 'My Grandma relied on an endless source' (2007) is a cascading blue waterfall, whose origin is a non-descript section of the wall. Made from what appears to be styro-foam, the crystallised splash on the floor is framed by a delicate cage of silver-leafed birch and ash-grey filings and are loosely scattered on the ground. Unlike the waterfalls of reality Droscher presents us with an image frozen in time and a sculpture that doesn’t attempt to be real and neither obviously unreal. Folded into a re-envisioned Baroque boundaries are not merely irrelevant but become entangled with their opposites.
The ‘reality’ Droscher creates for the viewer is at once an internal reality as it is a production of understanding, of representation, of art and of art history,
References to the magical, symbolic, sacrilegious, and kitsch undergo a mutability, volatility and uncertainty, which are interlaced in their surfaces. The smoothness and plasticity that is presented in works such as ‘Would you believe it if your child confessed to be an incarnation of your late mother’ (2007) operate alongside an epoch all too knowledgeable of the traps and critiques of historicism.
However, and above all Droscher’s strongest and deepest moments are in his ability to skip between illusion and materiality. Form meets symbolism in his sculptures and through this resistance of linear narratives and formulaic endeavours he manages to express an essence of the universal in his work.