Paul Czerlitzki: So Far So Good
Brand New Gallery presents “So Far So Good” the first solo exhibition by Paul Czerlitzki in Italy.
The conceptual paintings of the artist, who was born in Danzig in 1986, constitute series of works, so-called pictorial corpora, which are connected with one another from the beginning of the process of creation onwards. “So Far So Good” includes a wall painting and large-scale canvas works.
In the site specific wall work Czerlitzki uses the canvas only as a performative transfer material: the acrylic colour penetrates the fibres of the canvas and it’s transferred onto the walls behind. In this way the artist has only a conditional, contingent influence on the result. The works so created are depictions of the canvas structure inverted into the negative.
In these picture series, Czerlitzki is pursuing the idea of an organic pictorial corpus expanding in all directions, its component parts – the individual ‘paintings’ – having an existence of their own but being premonstrations of a whole which leaves traditional categories of oeuvre and work behind it.
Paul Czerlitzki conceives painting as a playing field, on which he is, little by little, forever shifting the parameters.
The playing field of the exhibition is expanded by a further pictorial corpus of works, whose shade or color gradation become iridescent as the beholder changes his viewing point, emerged from the above-mentioned wall work. When, during the production of the wall painting, black acrylic dust spread around the room, Czerlitzki caught it on white-primed canvases, thus generating the so-termed ‘dust pieces’ out of a side-product of the wall-hung work. The volatile, yet visually highly visceral surface exudes a seductive power, holding the gaze spell-bound in a bewitchingly oscillating pictorial space that, despite its flatness, points to an almost uncanny infinity. The fixing of the acrylic dust on the surfaces is highly labile, stabilizing itself only after a lengthy period of time. The dust works are thus extremely vulnerable ‘paintings’, at the mercy of the exhibition-goers, their physical control and wilfulness. The works enter upon a mutual relationship, into which the beholders physically inscribe themselves, leaving behind traces and so, as it were, becoming co-authors of the works of art. At the same time, the surface effect of the dust works conditions the movement and perception of the beholders – above all their self-perception.
The exhibition is strictly connected to the last two solo exhibitions: Anna at Johann König in Berlin and More Time at Galerie Laurent Godin in Paris.
