Artists: Karsten Födinger and Pieter Vermeersch
Curated by: Maria Chiara Valacchi
Venue: Cabinet, Milan, Italy
Date: February 20 – April 4, 2015
Photography: Filippo Armellin, images courtesy of the artists and Cabinet, Milan
What is lightness? Pulverization of reality, taken on weightless and pleasing, supported by its opposite, the heft as a vision of compactness of the world. In Lucretius “De Rerum Natura”, the lightness is none other than a mass of invisible particles, atoms with unpredictable change of courses, is the poetry of the unknown of anything on everything.
The counterpoint between the two artists, Karsten Födinger and Pieter Vermeersch, seems to be precisely the gap and the synthesis between the two opposing concepts, but it’s only a superficial imprinting that cripples the underlying concept of their work together. The two artists act on a concept of floating sensory and they both grab, even though the apparent and real research for a stylistic perfection, the accidental nature of the compositive action in a focused discussion with the empty space; the real variable as the solid bodies that occupys it.
Karsten Födinger creates installations designed to reinterpret the places of intervention and redefine the spatial tensions otherwise predictable and conventional; his works are made by iron, concrete and wood, everything based on the paradox of the unfinished, requiring a constant friction between the place and the way of perception. For Cabinet, Födinger seems to give up the most exquisitely – brut – material composition, suggesting the absence of a gravitational body. A heap made of five large river beams floats anchored by a series of “dead bodies” of concrete; the mass and the volume are exactly complementary to the research for a perfect and conceptual balance of the forces.
On the contrary, in Pieter Vermeersch’s work there is no focal point, the viewer get lost in the perception of an impalpable and shimmering work, losing all the classic dynamics of composition, which are well-defined only by a graphic clear cut. Vermeersch has a different method of painting, an anonymize and projected practice of the creation of a new objectivity. During the process of the color fading, of the tonal view, Vermeersch aspires to a demystification of the Neue Sachlichkeit, a process that goes beyond painting, it’s the figment of a calculated practice of depletion, that turn towards an other philosophical and theoretical horizon.
In the explanation of a formal tale, everything lose the consciousness of the defined impression and everything comes to an abstraction made only by concrete pulse and trascendent messages, they are all symbols of a continious mercurial process.
