David Roth’s solo exhibition “Certain circumstances – Selected flowers.“ at Jean Guillaume Panis presents a selection of his latest works, created during his residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris this summer and after his return to his hometown Vienna. In these “Flower Paintings” Roth further extends his foray into working with flowers, however not employing them as a sujet but as his instruments. Used as paintbrushes, they become part of the painting process. The flowers’ varying character and texture leave behind marks and shapes that surprise us, some appearing anarchical, some poetical. The appropriation of flowers as painting tools is not to be understood as questioning traditional equipment, which David Roth does use in other projects for his painterly research, but rather as an alternative allowing to extend the painter’s vocabulary.
The exhibition confronts two work groups of flower paintings: On the one hand there are large-format canvasses painted en plein air and in the immediate vicinity to the flowers picked as brushes with paint mixed by Roth from pigments and binders, on the other hand there are ink drawings on handmade, deckle edged paper resonating with a subtly different air and colour shades, even though also painted with floral instruments.
David Roth‘s oeuvre is characterized by a variety of projects: He might use flowers as brushes, resulting in his “Flower Paintings“ or drag canvases through forests, onto trees, or up onto mountains, even into a museum, he transforms paintings into a raft, a tent or a sledge, or stacks used, painted material on wooden trestles, resulting in four-legged, colourful, voluminous bodies pregnant with painting(s), he has named “Brains“. He moves between multimedia and conceptual approaches – from painting on canvas, to video, photo and per- formative works, installations, and conceptual painting ideas. The common thread – or rather the origin of it – is questioning painting, questioning what painting is or was meant to be and questioning what painting can be. To him painting is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only then a work of art.
David Roth (Austria, 1985) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria) in 2011. He is based in Vienna, Austria.
