Artists: David Fesl and Esther Kläs
Exhibition title: I will watch with you
Curated by: Zuzana Blochová
Venue: The Center for Contemporary Arts Prague (CCA Prague), Prague, The Czech Republic
Date: May 15 – July 7, 2024
Photography: ©Tomáš Souček / images copyright and courtesy of the artists and The Center for Contemporary Arts Prague
I met Esther Kläs in 2011 at her studio in Brooklyn and David Fesl as a student in 2017 in Prague. Over the years I have collaborated with both artists several times and we have become friends. We have often talked about the artistic process and artworks, which mostly come into being as a result of something we as viewers cannot see.
Both artists work with a different scale. Their works seem to exist on different levels. The installation is subtle, the works keep their distance and communicate with each other rather internally, as if two close acquaintances share the space of one room, each doing their own thing, but present together.
The sculptures and objects on display can be approached with visual understanding. Indeed, they attempt a certain independence from narrative or explanation. Escape from language can be irritating. At this very moment there is a change in perception and a slightly different reality appears, and we are able to re-establish a relationship with what is in front of us.
– DAVID
The search for material that takes place almost daily involves deciding what to pick up, what not to pick up, and what to put back down having first picked up. This creates a kind of archive of natural but above all human findings that fit in the palm of the hand. The form of most of them has changed over time due to physical forces and pressures. But once the objects become part of the archive, further significant changes are basically suspended.
David creates objects out of the archived materials by adding one element at a time and tracking how the whole changes and thus the impression it gives. He is always working on several compositions simultaneously and responds less to his own expectations than to the stimuli of the materials in an attempt to see the images they offer, images that appear in the possibilities of combination and gesture. It is almost as if prefigurations of the compositions exist in the archive – to which, however, there is no shortcut and which may only be revealed through a long process of observation and trial and error.
Each found object has its own story, though the artist’s aim is not to reconstruct the narrative or find connections. Real things resist remaining suspended in abstraction, but easily create scenery and still lifes, quickly forming associations and enclosing themselves within meanings. Rather than supporting the meanings of objects, David removes or redirects them.
In a given situation the intermingling of findings creates a new form of family or kinship. Objects wedged and clasped into each other seem to have been, and continue to be, drawn towards one another, or to be entering into a different type of covenant. It is as though a fleeting movement takes place between them, before they once more settle into a static state. The artist manages to maintain the compositions on the edge of a kind of tension, just before the image of the impossible interrelations of things or the unbearable deformation of fragments overreaches and collapses in on itself, as Will Bradley describes in his essay on David’s work.*
It is only when the works are installed in space that they cease to form pairs or series, but stand out individually and maintain sufficient distance from each other. They reveal themselves in their vulnerability like an animal basking in the sun, sensing no danger and unbothered by the fact it is being watched.
* Will Bradley, The Crisis of the Object Revisited, 2023
– ESTHER
Sit and Choose
The sculpture of two bronze rods on folding chairs was created on the basis of questions. How can a horizontal shape exist in space? Is it mobile, is it a moment, is it stable? Is it a closed or open form? Does it possess volume? How does the surface of horizontal space relate to its surroundings?
The rods are placed on the external and internal part of the seating area and use the structure of the chairs as a guide. The seating area and the back of the chairs are cut so as to carry as little of the function and meaning of the object of the chair as possible. The chair is an already existing shape in our world and there is therefore no need to create a new one – in this case it acts as the load-bearing structure and is part of the sculpture.
The bronze rods have an irregular shape. Such shapes seem to be able to anchor themselves in space and reflect it back in diverse directions, as if the regular shapes do not hold together in space and fall through it. The tension between the rods is thus created through the space defined by their surfaces.
Come closer, part 2
The installation of a vertical shape with four circles can be seen as a kit that conceals within itself the potential for other constellations and physical shapes.
Esther’s vertical sculptures are a manifestation of the accumulation of matter that takes on the form of the essence of a physically present character. They can be perceived as indicators of being in space, defining the relationship between sculptures and people.
In her work, space is not nothingness or emptiness. It reflects back what exists physically within it. In this sense, the circle defines space through its own shape.
Dehors
A series of modules that are arranged differently in each installation depending on the surrounding space and the placement of the first module. The installation works intuitively with lines (in the manner of a drawing), where each movement, each mark, builds on the previous one while also being a consideration of inner and outer space.
