Artnews Projects

Aline Bouvy / John Gillis
Damien Deroubaix
Johannes Heidenpeter
Tina Gillen
Manuel Ocampo
Assan Smati
Wawrzyniec Tokarski
Klaus Winichner

curated by Alex Reding

Regardless of the medium used for expression, the artists and their works come together through their rejection of our icon-saturated existence while embracing it as a form of inspiration. The symbols, fantasies, memories, and desires seen in the exhibition merge to create echoes of the internal clashes found in everyday existence.

The work of Aline Bouvy (B) /John Gillis (B) features 2 and 3-dimensional assemblages that form a schematically disorganized bodily form. Drawn from a variety of contexts, including the art-historical archive, the haute couture boutique and the sex shop, these resources are de-faced and reconfigured into libidinally charged, faux mythological totemic fetishes. Like tribal artifacts, these are collective manifestations, but here the tribe exists as a 'community to come' waiting to affect and be affected.

Zine culture, street posters, and low-grade reproductions provide the aesthetic base for French born artist Damien Deroubaix (FR/DE). The communication from the work is direct, creating exclamations from the walls themselves while managing to leave the artists relationship to this voice ambiguous. The pieces reflect the working artist and the idea of living and "speaking" in a working art world, not one solely for the manufacturing of elitist commodity productions

The paintings of Tina Gillen (B/L/USA) are created with both intensity and precision, creating a tension of near abstract forms with narrative imagery. Through the suppression and shift of descriptive elements the artist deprives the paintings of any certainty, shattering the notion of the painting as a representational device of the real and coherent world. Memories and desires merge: a feeling of ubiquity seizes the viewer who in turn becomes the legitimizing actor of the painting’s reality.

Manuel Ocampo (USA) creates an echo of internal clashes inherent in the conflicts of a Filipino immigrant living in the US. Overlaying the complex weave of his cultural confusion are the resonant threads of man's inhumanity to man creating a fusion between potent political symbols and sacred religious elements. The whole is tied together with scatological and sexual references acted out by figures set in brightly lit stages giving a performance of morality gone awry.

Assan Smati (FR) avoids the trappings of the accumulated perceptions of sculpture through the reinvention of representations. His sculptures are deliberately dubious territory, minimalisticly brutal and refined beyond their decorative capacity. His works attempt to awaken our collective cultural memory and reveal to us the world we once reigned, when our minds were less distracted by the media ruled world we live in today.

Wawrzyniec Tokarski (PL) works with overlapping visual and textual layers, with the iconography of writing, signs, and symbols while using media aesthetics to draw attention to political and social processes. The text is absorbed in the content of the image, generating a critique, which is already inscribed in the painting. Understanding the world for Tokarski happens through the perception of its images using the excess of media images to report subjectively on events.

Klaus Winichner's meticulously composed sculptures form entities whose figurative, abstract and even narrative elements serve to combine a partly romantic and mental atmosphere with a tangible material- and subject-related presence.

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