Artist: Markus Saile
Exhibition title: Everything Folds
Venue: DREI, Cologne, Germany
Date: March 15 – May 4, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and DREI, Cologne
Markus Saile’s paintings visualize the gesture of the hand, the space of a hand movement that is created by acting as a body in space. The eyes of the viewer of his paintings follow finely nuanced brushstrokes executed in a single movement. These glazed areas lie next to each other, overlap, ripple out at the end or are interrupted or covered in the middle of their course by a curving coil that Saile has applied to the picture ground in a separate gestural setting, which now connects the resulting inner pictorial spaces with each other and emerges from the paintings as a fold like a twisting movement of light and shadow.
The fold ~ it draws in the viewer’s gaze, leading them into a loop of the visible and the imaginable. It forms a relationship between painterly and virtual space, which follows neither strictly constructed perspective nor expressive expression, but is created in a chemical-mechanical process of oil paint, turpentine and Saile’s guided hand movement on a smoothly sanded chalk ground and tells of this correspondence along the edges of the panel painting, while those edges of the handmade picture support show the traces of the painting process: The colors of the different layers of paint run wildly next to and over each other, exposing the working process of painting in the structure of their open framing, showing the body of the painting in the here and now, which becomes unbounded and opens up to the other paintings hung in the exhibition. The spatial differentiation, which initially becomes visible in Saile’s specific handling of color on the body of the painting, is now also evident in the hanging, which addresses the connecting activity of the viewers in the exhibition space.
Three extremely narrow, tall pictures from the Pipes series thus structure the first exhibition space, leading into the vertical of the much higher room, framing it like a symbolic setting analogous to the “|” [pipe] sign that marks the data stream between two processes in a programming code. Markus Saile chooses formats for his image carriers that go beyond the norm and resonate with the architecture of the exhibition space: Windows, doors, protrusions, passageways and details form a frame of reference for the hanging. On each of the three walls that form the first exhibition space with the gallery’s glass façade, a picture is placed that extends in its individual location between floor and ceiling, keeping the institutional space visible and at the same time the autonomy of the pictorial body, which corresponds with the surrounding space: with the paintings adjacent to the neighboring walls; with the pictures that conceptually facet the following gallery spaces; with the people who enter this space, move around in it and read the pictures in their nuanced orientation from different perspectives.
Markus Saile expands the specific pictorial space of a painting to include the surrounding architecture and the people capturing the image. It is the various visual axes, tensions and the resulting connections that occur in the fluid perception of his paintings: a network of relationships in which figure and figuration enter into a changing relationship with position and disposition.
— Christina Irrgang
Everything Folds is Markus Saile’s (b. 1981, Stuttgart, Germany) first solo exhibiton with the gallery and in Cologne where he lives and works. His works recently have been subject of exhibitions at Bel Ami, Los Angeles (group, 2024); Mai 36, Zurich (solo, 2022); Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen (solo, 2020); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (group, 2020); Kunstmuseum Bonn (group, 2019), among others.
