Max Frey
10 Jan - 21 Feb 2009
MAX FREY
Vera Cortês, Art Agency
Opening January 9th at 22h
From January 10th to February 21st 2008
Tuesdays to Fridays from 11h to 19h
Saturdays from 15h to 20h
The Austrian artist Max Frey (Graz, 1976) presents, at the Vera Cortês Art Agency, two of his pieces (Rotor d/200 and Floating Bubbles) simultaneously with an exhibition of Alexandre Farto (Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat). This presentation has a twofold purpose:
on one hand, to pursue an important motivation of the Vera Cortês Art Agency – to introduce the Portuguese public to national and international young artists currently producing a particularly interesting body of work that is consistent and relevant in relation to a certain mapping of the possibilities continuously opening up in contemporary art; on the other hand, to enable a certain resonance with the work of the artist Alexandre Farto – although they are profoundly different in their plasticity and main interests, both artists feature in their works unique appropriations of the possible intersections between, on one hand, key issues pertaining to an anthropology of art and culture and, on the other, new techniques and material elements characteristic of our contemporary age.
The two pieces displayed by Max Frey represent two particular important points of entry for understanding the work he has been developing. Both pieces involve working around possible relations and manipulations between movement, light, and time, giving way to a central issue - the formation and permanence of an image as perception and memory. Rotor d/200 activates a possible functionality between drawing, movement, and light. The drawing presents itself as the source of duration – as if assuming the functioning of continuous neuronal synapses, moving into a level that precedes the possibility of image itself. Rotoreliefs, by Duchamp, is here evoked as a field open to a contemporary mode of perception which is aware of the mental physical states that are engaged by itself. The memory of an image, its duration, relies on the dual principle of absence or presence – intermittent substances or a daring look to the reverse side of the images.
With Floating Bubbles, Max Frey takes us to the same experimentation space of a certain formation of images, by introducing, amongst the functional structures, an element within the realm of the impossible: the soap bubble that floats while reflecting an almost invisible image of light, bursting without leaving any trace of its brief existence. Here, we are presented with the image in its most subversive, difficult and uncontrollable dimension – the image that exists between visibility and invisibility, the image without a destination, the instant as the place of an almost blind perception.
In his work with surprisingly distant materials, that are potentially useless, Max Frey allows us to experience a world that is very simple but very difficult to accept - a world where our perception offers us a fundamental disappointment: the strength of appearance.
Cíntia Gil
Vera Cortês, Art Agency
Opening January 9th at 22h
From January 10th to February 21st 2008
Tuesdays to Fridays from 11h to 19h
Saturdays from 15h to 20h
The Austrian artist Max Frey (Graz, 1976) presents, at the Vera Cortês Art Agency, two of his pieces (Rotor d/200 and Floating Bubbles) simultaneously with an exhibition of Alexandre Farto (Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat). This presentation has a twofold purpose:
on one hand, to pursue an important motivation of the Vera Cortês Art Agency – to introduce the Portuguese public to national and international young artists currently producing a particularly interesting body of work that is consistent and relevant in relation to a certain mapping of the possibilities continuously opening up in contemporary art; on the other hand, to enable a certain resonance with the work of the artist Alexandre Farto – although they are profoundly different in their plasticity and main interests, both artists feature in their works unique appropriations of the possible intersections between, on one hand, key issues pertaining to an anthropology of art and culture and, on the other, new techniques and material elements characteristic of our contemporary age.
The two pieces displayed by Max Frey represent two particular important points of entry for understanding the work he has been developing. Both pieces involve working around possible relations and manipulations between movement, light, and time, giving way to a central issue - the formation and permanence of an image as perception and memory. Rotor d/200 activates a possible functionality between drawing, movement, and light. The drawing presents itself as the source of duration – as if assuming the functioning of continuous neuronal synapses, moving into a level that precedes the possibility of image itself. Rotoreliefs, by Duchamp, is here evoked as a field open to a contemporary mode of perception which is aware of the mental physical states that are engaged by itself. The memory of an image, its duration, relies on the dual principle of absence or presence – intermittent substances or a daring look to the reverse side of the images.
With Floating Bubbles, Max Frey takes us to the same experimentation space of a certain formation of images, by introducing, amongst the functional structures, an element within the realm of the impossible: the soap bubble that floats while reflecting an almost invisible image of light, bursting without leaving any trace of its brief existence. Here, we are presented with the image in its most subversive, difficult and uncontrollable dimension – the image that exists between visibility and invisibility, the image without a destination, the instant as the place of an almost blind perception.
In his work with surprisingly distant materials, that are potentially useless, Max Frey allows us to experience a world that is very simple but very difficult to accept - a world where our perception offers us a fundamental disappointment: the strength of appearance.
Cíntia Gil