Daniel Roth
18 Jan - 09 Mar 2013
DANIEL ROTH
19 January - 9 March 2013
Daniel Roth`s installations produce narratives: Using objects, drawing, collage, photography and film, he merges real and fictive spaces. Places belonging to literature, science or geography are incorporated in his installations, associatively reconstructed, and developed further within them as correlations.
Often the artist works with found (natural) materials, which he subjects to a conceptual metamorphosis and integrates within his installational reference systems, as a link to that which lies beyond narrative space. In his current exhibition at Meyer Riegger Karlsruhe, the artist unites the possible with the surreal, which develops out of the shape of the work, its bilateral references to the real and the imagined are encoded almost like chapters in the succession of spatial elements.
In the front room of the gallery, two amorphous fur objects hang on the wall. Their curvature, extending into the room, appears to be concealing the recognisable, so that the corpus of the objects almost seem like fragments of a landscape. In front of them lies a rectangular silicone cast of a rock, with brown wood ash strewn upon it. This partially cloaks the shining silicone surface, so that the cast of the landscape excerpt remains visible as a notion only. An equally rectangular brick object accompanies these objects as an architectural metaphor: it resembles a location marking, however, it revokes any type of spatial specification. The description of a (temporary) place continues in the second showroom. An old Opel Manta seat, which Roth found on a plateau in a forest and used there for a while, is incorporated in a plaster construction, which surrounds the seat like slabs of stone or ice floes, encasing it with geometrical elements. On an olive green wall a white drawing shows the silhouette of two snow shoes, their oval form was transferred by Roth into a wooden structure, which emblematically converges with the drawing as an object.
The allegory of travel finally climaxes in a collage, which Daniel Roth shows in the back room: islands cut out of an atlas, which the artist arranged in a sequence – as a chain of islands or as a kind of path – attached to the wall. This voyage-themed piece is accompanied by a scaffolding-like display case, a rectangular structure on four legs, made of wood and metal, which contains nothing, but has a cuboid construction of stone adjacent to it. The cube seems like a fortress in the fields of transit, a destination point for the notional journey that – in following the traces left by Daniel Roth – the viewer reaches, and may further develop as an internal image.
Christina Irrgang (translation Zoe Miller)
19 January - 9 March 2013
Daniel Roth`s installations produce narratives: Using objects, drawing, collage, photography and film, he merges real and fictive spaces. Places belonging to literature, science or geography are incorporated in his installations, associatively reconstructed, and developed further within them as correlations.
Often the artist works with found (natural) materials, which he subjects to a conceptual metamorphosis and integrates within his installational reference systems, as a link to that which lies beyond narrative space. In his current exhibition at Meyer Riegger Karlsruhe, the artist unites the possible with the surreal, which develops out of the shape of the work, its bilateral references to the real and the imagined are encoded almost like chapters in the succession of spatial elements.
In the front room of the gallery, two amorphous fur objects hang on the wall. Their curvature, extending into the room, appears to be concealing the recognisable, so that the corpus of the objects almost seem like fragments of a landscape. In front of them lies a rectangular silicone cast of a rock, with brown wood ash strewn upon it. This partially cloaks the shining silicone surface, so that the cast of the landscape excerpt remains visible as a notion only. An equally rectangular brick object accompanies these objects as an architectural metaphor: it resembles a location marking, however, it revokes any type of spatial specification. The description of a (temporary) place continues in the second showroom. An old Opel Manta seat, which Roth found on a plateau in a forest and used there for a while, is incorporated in a plaster construction, which surrounds the seat like slabs of stone or ice floes, encasing it with geometrical elements. On an olive green wall a white drawing shows the silhouette of two snow shoes, their oval form was transferred by Roth into a wooden structure, which emblematically converges with the drawing as an object.
The allegory of travel finally climaxes in a collage, which Daniel Roth shows in the back room: islands cut out of an atlas, which the artist arranged in a sequence – as a chain of islands or as a kind of path – attached to the wall. This voyage-themed piece is accompanied by a scaffolding-like display case, a rectangular structure on four legs, made of wood and metal, which contains nothing, but has a cuboid construction of stone adjacent to it. The cube seems like a fortress in the fields of transit, a destination point for the notional journey that – in following the traces left by Daniel Roth – the viewer reaches, and may further develop as an internal image.
Christina Irrgang (translation Zoe Miller)