chocolate bar taped to a door

Result #1

. Lying in bed, seemingly fascinated by the window ledge, she looked out of the window at the Fraktakreiter. As if the photograph had come back to her, she appeared a few moments later, with her baby and a tank. The sky above seemed to be darkening, and the steles here were actually just beginning to darken.The intimacy of such moments could not be less vivid. Like two lover in love, the photographer was paralyzed by the gap between what she was seeing and what she was experiencing. In our modern world, the gap between the real and the photographic space of the image often widens, producing, in the brain, a sense of alienation, in which we are actually on separate worlds. Thus, in the end, the work is an embodiment of the uncertainty that is the defining characteristic of photography: whether the things that are photographed actually exist, or whether they do not.Femmerick has always used photographs of other people as an artistic counterpart to her own. The links between the two artists always seem vague, but, in the end, there is no question that the representation of such a close relationship is at least partially responsible for the work.

Result #2

. Here is a bit of painted decoration which functions as both background and foreground: an art object in which the work of art is juxtaposed with a work of art that is alive and transforms itself. When a painting is fully exhausted, one can also say: As Ive just said, its life and life alone which is exhausted, a figurative painting with no figure, but all the life there is.

Result #3

. As the unwieldy form, the tag, the valise, the box, the leather (with its multiple meanings), the paint job, and the concept of the art object, these colorful molds of identity disintegrate.Perhaps the most potent effect of Martinis reticence is her apparent avoidance of the last word, which turns into a strategy of up-to-the-minute information. To produce the works on display, Martini covered the walls of her gallery with open windows that allowed her compositions to be seen as an unseen wall within the works themselves. This proximity to the outside and its dimension in time, this close connection with the outside, are apparent in an array of reproductions that include reproductions of books on history, sociology, psychology, and advertising. By that time the works displayed had a presence that made it clear that they were not merely props in a performance. The first thing this exhibition did, after all, was to become a gallery show. Its nonheroic center stood in the strange position that it couldnt accommodate the fluid display of an exhibition.

Result #4

frame with a candle, Orange is a solemnly sober (and rather cheesy) take on the nature/nurture dichotomy. With the door as a barrier, the room becomes a kind of prisoner, keeping the nonliving parts out while the living ones in become living sculpture, signaling that we are not quite as happy with the univocal outcome of all these interferences. The possibility of isolation is both real and not, but not completely real either, since, as Peter McNamee argues in an excellent catalogue essay, this is a room in which ourselves and others may linger, and in which perceptions and sensations—even our perception of the air around us—may be permanently lodged. In one sense, the scene is increasingly tenable by the minute, with the spectator increasingly complicit in the spectators control. But in another sense, the distance from a changeable space to one we wouldnt like to leave, the one we dont want to make too many faces for, grows ever closer. And there, looking in at us through the door, are ever more anxieties that weve been avoiding, no matter how carefully the choreography has been rehearsed.

Result #5

chocolate bar taped to a doorframe, of which a huge blob, its surface etched with howls of agony, has spilled forth—the remains of a giant queasy child. The burlesque effects are a dark gothic one, with the mutilation of Christ as a portal to a dark magic garden. It is a garden of pain, a garden of ecstasy, a garden of curse.Paolini borrowed the technique of the Hairy Who, the diabolical clowns who created a set of public spectacle in the 60s and had been very popular in England, for their material, complex pictorial invention. He achieves the same effects using a brush of paint that covers a large part of a canvas—and this is a brush with a rather small handle—but one with a sharp, low-powered, almost mechanical brushstroke. And this means that the colors, in spite of their subtlety, are not pale and soft but hard, which in the drawings may appear almost beaubles, and so they become grotesque, gloomy, inarticulate.In this sense, the intention of the landscape as a medium is really the one of an artist who is at his best in a way that is not commercial. This is not only because it is an arbitrary combination of symbolic images, but because it is also a way of leaving the viewer with his own private marks. This may be his most personal approach to painting—and his most direct—yet. With this risk the philosopher ends up in an uncanny spot. Paolini has been deliberately trying to avoid the danger.He is good at drawing the edge of the brush and also good at what the Hairy Who did in the 70s, with an impressiveness that is more personal, an affect that is both personal and antifashionable. For the most part, the three drawings in this show contain collages, usually representing men in the act of committing acts of violence.