Tim Plamper at Eduardo Secci Contemporary

Artist: Tim Plamper

Exhibition title: Security

Curated by: Domenico de Chirico

Venue: Eduardo Secci Contemporary, Florence, Italy

Date: November 23, 2019 – February 15, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Eduardo Secci Contemporary

“Human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions.”
Georges Bataille, L’anus solaire

Eduardo Secci gallery is pleased to present “Security”, a solo exhibit by the artist Tim Plamper, curated by Domenico de Chirico. The opening will take place on November 23, 2019 at 6:30pm at our main exhibition spaces in Piazza Goldoni 2, Florence, Italy.

The interdisciplinary nature of Tim Plamper’s practice originates from an interest in many fields of knowledge: from literature to anthropology, from philosophy to sociology, from art history to eroticism and transgression. An empirically-based theory that sees the human mind as the origin of all knowledge since it receives the stimuli of the outside world, and then organizes and expresses them via language, the exploration of physical experience and multifaceted nudity, including the hedonistic nuditas naturalis, the charitable nuditas temporalis, the innocent nuditas virtualis and the lustful nuditas criminalis, reconsidered beyond the symbolic garments between Eros and Thanatos, are all peculiar characteristics of Tim Plamper’s most recent works.

In the artist’s virtuous and meticulous drawings, nudity, permeated with “personal mystery” and aimed at revealing beauty, appears like a pit in which magnificence and cruelty are unspeakably intertwined, and where in the grey area the celebration of the rite of union between life and death takes place. It’s a great grotto, a luxurious orifice, warm and humid, scented both of life and death, in which aesthetic frenzy and the sublimation of form are ready to dance: emotional self-perfection and psychological defense mechanisms are lost.

Tim Plamper’s attempt is to gather all of these commotions and ruptures in a sort of classical frame: that of drawing. The three large-sized drawings foreseen for this new personal show entitled Security, take shape through the fusion of two different and real spaces: a grotto in Greece and a partial view of a street in front of the artist’s studio in Berlin. In one of these drawings, Plamper lies naked between two women, surrounded by a swarm of bees that visibly consists of a herd of drones, and all around them are cars, which are a metaphor for Charon’s boat, in which “He poles the boat and trims the sails himself, and ferries the dead in his dark skiff.” (1).

Another fundamental element of this corollary is the concept of gravity: the force that connects us to our planet, due to the abstraction that Earth exerts on all material bodies, that force that allows us to fall vertically onto the ground and to sink in our innermost desires and in our destiny, ideally made of love and devotion.

Plamper finds the irrational hemisphere much more interesting than the converse comfort zone and, therefore, all that he carries out can certainly be incorporated in his work, thus giving life to a series of newer metaphors, poised between the indecent and the refined, which in medias res are woven together and blend following the rule of surrealist images to then unveil and reunite according to a circular rhythm without end.

-Domenico de Chirico

(1) (Virgil, Aeneid)

Tim Plamper, born in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany in 1982. He currently lives and works in Berlin. He studied Fine Arts at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design with Alexander Roob and then, from 2003 – 2009, at the University of East London with John Smith. His works have been exhibited widely in both Germany and abroad. Among his recent exhibitions, we recall: Exit II (Prolog) (2019), Megamelange, Cologne; Reflection is a Wall (2019), Unttld Contemporary, Vienna; Not dark yet (2018), Kunsthaus Muerz, Muerzzuschlag, Austria; Zone (2017), Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris; L’œil du collectionneur (2016), Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art Strasbourg; Atlas (2016), Unttld Contemporary, Vienna; Hausbesetzung (2014), Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden.

Security

Why are we all so lonely?
And where are we so?

Crash! In the best case.
Our bodies smashed to the ground.

What is so hard in wanting
the other one being a self?

I am the storm.
I am just crap.

Fuck me Fuck me Fuck me Fuck me…
Fuck me – or at least hold my hand

Trust me even though
I’m not worthy – but you can trust that!

I do adore you!
Connecting the worlds

We are all human
Frightened at night

But sometimes a sun beam
touches your leg…