22 January - 5 March 2011 Opening: Saturday 22 January, 6 - 9 pm
In December 1915, Kazimir Malevich showed his Black Square for the first time: a black square painted on a larger white canvas. He installed the work close to the ceiling and in the corner of an exhibition room. This placement had a special symbolic significance, because in the Russian orthodox tradition, this is the place where icons are hung. It seems as if Malevich was trying to bring the everything and the nothing together: unlimited eternity and absolute emptiness. The first version of this black square developed a surprising life of its own: the many layers of paint revealed over time more and more craquelure, the paint drying out unexpectedly broke up the monochrome plane. Thus the changes in Malevich�s works confirmed unexpectedly the old scientific theory of the horror vacui[1], according to which both humans and nature abhor the void. The mental void which Malevich wanted to create on his canvas was undermined and cancelled out by the physical presence of the small cracks.
The discomfort which is generated by a void or a nothing is one of the recurring impulses in Helmut Stallaerts� oeuvre. The pictures he creates are always poised between being and non-being. He does not picture the void itself (even Malevich shows us that that is impossible), but rather that which envelops the void. Many of Stallaerts� works are best understood as dreams or hallucinations which on the one hand lead us closer to the enigma, but on the other hand appear as an unknown black hole, throwing us off balance.
One of the central works in the exhibition A Great Void is The Count (2010). Four people sit on a podium and stare at an empty table. The room is closed off by a grand yellowish-golden curtain. Through the curtain, blurred perspective lines forming an empty, seemingly endless corridor are visible. The shadows of the sitting figures slip away, underneath the curtain, in the direction of the empty space. The thin atmosphere in which the events are steeped, feels like an evacuated room where the aspect of �time� is cancelled, as if in this world, the sense of discomfort would last forever.
Man is undoubtedly the central motif in Helmut Stallaerts� complex and broad oeuvre. It is not man in the here and now, but alienated man, blurred and absent. In a rather theatrical and often awkward way, he shows himself, poses for his audience. The actions he undertakes frequently smack of an undefined ritual. There is nothing comical about the absurd atmosphere created in this way; on the contrary, it is very strange and dark. The environment by which his human existence is framed is similarly alien: without any anecdotal detail, sterile and cold.
The obsessive aesthetics that Stallaerts develops in his oeuvre creates a sacred dimension through which the works always relate to one another. This context creates a core around which all his works circulate. This enigmatic core, however, remains: one can merely get closer to it, but never actually reach it. An exhibition by Helmut Stallaerts has the power to generate a view on the mysteries of being; it also confronts us with a truth that remains dark and that unhinges our own fictive truths.
Tanguy Eeckhout
[1] In the natural sciences of antiquity and the Middle Ages, horror vacui (fear of empty spaces) stood for the theory that nature abhors a vacuum: a piece of empty soil is quickly covered with vegetation, a barrel where the liquid escapes fills with oxygen... (source: www.wikipedia.org). In art, horror vacui stands for a formal dissolution of the pictorial space: the artist decides to fill every empty space so that the composition is regarded as full.
RAFAL BUJNOWSKI Corner
22 January - 5 March 2011 Opening: Saturday 22 January, 6 - 9 pm
Johnen Galerie is pleased to present its second solo exhibition with new works by Polish artist Rafal Bujnowski. Bujnowski has been working for a number of years with �lamp black�, a very intense black tone with high gloss. The artist applies the color with a broad brushstroke that creates fine relief structures reflecting the light in different ways. In the end, the pictures are generated by light: Bujnowski does not see himself as creator, but rather takes himself as �assistant�. Recently he started to present these images behind highly reflective glass so that space, light and painting �melt� together and alter the images according to the location of the viewer.
The Corner paintings are installed in the corners of the gallery room and interface between painting and sculpture. They explore new possibilities of specific objects, in the sense of Donald Judd�s 1965 essay.
Paintings such as Eye Sockets consist of different grey and black brush strokes that allude in their combination to unfinished building developments. Bujnowski�s works are never removed from everyday concerns. The painting stays present as a material object, whether it depicts familiar matters or whether it reflects light, color, brushstrokes or the room surrounding it. Building facades, poster walls, protest banners or devotional objects are as much part of it as painterly reproductions of family portraits or news photographs. But unlike a painter such as Gerhard Richter, Bujnowski�s painting does not aim for highest professional skill, but rather for calculated simplicity.
Bujnowski does not balk for his conceptual approach to be seen in proximity to assembly instructions. Seemingly one only requires the right paint, a specific type of brushes or tools to be able to produce the works. While his earlier works were conceived to be inexpensive art for the everyday household, like his series �Cheap Art from Poland�, his more recent work resides between abstract high art and everyday reality of paint, material, light and space. Bujnowski deliberately distances his work from all poetic, dreamy, fantastic and opulent aspects of painting and refers to the objective investigations of minimal and conceptual art.
Finally, the exhibition also shows a headstone for Cyparis (1875 � 1929), a folk hero on the Carribean island of Martinique who was one of the few survivors of the volcanic eruption of 1902. He was incarcerated and survived in his cell while most of the 20,000 inhabitants of the island died. Bujnowski made the stone with the black volcanic sand of the island. The latent anarchistic undertone in Bujnowski�s work finds its counterpart in the story of the firebrand who is the lone survivor.
Bujnowski was born in Krakow in 1974. He studied architecture at the Technical University in Krakow and finished his degree in Graphic design at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts (1996-2000). He was a founding member of the �Ladnie�-group (together with Wilhelm Sasnal and Marcin Maciejowski). Bujnowski lives and works in Krakow.
