Elmar Vestner
29 Jun - 03 Aug 2013
ELMAR VESTNER
G A S
29 June – 3 August 2013
We’re pleased to present GAS, Elmar Vestner’s second solo show at SEPTEMBER. The title was inspired by a project of the same name by the electronic musician Wolfgang Voigt, who asserted that GAS’s intention was to “bring the forest into the disco, or the other way around.” Critics have described the sound of GAS, a blend of ambient and techno, as though “one were listening to a band playing from a very great distance, under water or behind a wall,” or like “an outdoor rave you hear in the form of sounds floating through the air from a nearby village.”
The intoxicating permeation and inversion of inner and outer realities, the simultaneous fascination for nature and industrial severity also characterize Elmar Vestner’s art. His works on paper, collages, plots, and painted and sanded photographs exist in various different stages of dissolution, of transition. He approaches the motif by applying and removing paint, by scratching and dissolving, systematically deconstructing the pictorial surfaces. Following this process, Vestner often reproduces and alters the works digitally, and then goes on to work on them by hand.
During this method, images Vestner has found or photographed himself of gardens, discotheques, caves, mountains, plants, forests, cloisters, and small statues become corroded, pulverized, fogged over. Scratches and traces of sanding break the image down into spots of light or superimpose themselves like veils; bleeding acrylic paint looks like acid rain disintegrating the picture. There are repeated allusions to Romantic painting, Gothic motifs, images from alchemy and occultism.
Vestner’s fluorescent mountains and acid caves, fog and cloud formations are reminiscent of bodily and spiritual experiences, feelings of alienation or ecstatic fusion. At the same time, however, they are components in a formal and conceptual composition that is determined by varying degrees of abstraction and figuration, affect and cunning.
G A S
29 June – 3 August 2013
We’re pleased to present GAS, Elmar Vestner’s second solo show at SEPTEMBER. The title was inspired by a project of the same name by the electronic musician Wolfgang Voigt, who asserted that GAS’s intention was to “bring the forest into the disco, or the other way around.” Critics have described the sound of GAS, a blend of ambient and techno, as though “one were listening to a band playing from a very great distance, under water or behind a wall,” or like “an outdoor rave you hear in the form of sounds floating through the air from a nearby village.”
The intoxicating permeation and inversion of inner and outer realities, the simultaneous fascination for nature and industrial severity also characterize Elmar Vestner’s art. His works on paper, collages, plots, and painted and sanded photographs exist in various different stages of dissolution, of transition. He approaches the motif by applying and removing paint, by scratching and dissolving, systematically deconstructing the pictorial surfaces. Following this process, Vestner often reproduces and alters the works digitally, and then goes on to work on them by hand.
During this method, images Vestner has found or photographed himself of gardens, discotheques, caves, mountains, plants, forests, cloisters, and small statues become corroded, pulverized, fogged over. Scratches and traces of sanding break the image down into spots of light or superimpose themselves like veils; bleeding acrylic paint looks like acid rain disintegrating the picture. There are repeated allusions to Romantic painting, Gothic motifs, images from alchemy and occultism.
Vestner’s fluorescent mountains and acid caves, fog and cloud formations are reminiscent of bodily and spiritual experiences, feelings of alienation or ecstatic fusion. At the same time, however, they are components in a formal and conceptual composition that is determined by varying degrees of abstraction and figuration, affect and cunning.