Presentation and exhibition of the Instant Edition # 6
The medium Christian Schwarzwald deals with in his art is drawing – the place where the most diverse areas of the fine arts meet. It is above all the place where the word meets the image. The word graphic itself derives in its original meaning from graphism – the art of performing writing.
Schwarzwald’s hypothesis as a draughtsman is that abstraction and reduction can evoke much in the viewer. “If, for example, you draw a line from left to right on a sheet of paper, it can quickly become the horizon. You only have one line on the sheet but you immediately have a view of the world. One has defined heaven and earth where they meet and one even defines the point of view of the viewer.” Quotation Black Forest.
The artist uses every writing instrument at his disposal. Among other things, he works with charcoal, ballpoint pens, ink and pencil. In his most recent works, the “Drawing Installations”, which he dubbed, the artist has attempted to create a form of graphics that actually open up to three-dimensional space. In many of his works, Schwarzwald has dealt with fences or ladders, since these are marked by a clear spatial, but not a visual restriction. But above all, the artist is interested in the question of where exactly a picture begins and why he additionally uses shadows. “This is somehow a vibrating membrane in my work that allows things that cannot be touched to be described spatially. Black Forest quote.
In the present series PUPA, the draughtsman Schwarzwald has now dealt specifically with the figuration of the doll’s stage. Actually a zoological term, it describes the transformation process of an insect. “There is always this puppet stage, i.e. this kind of spinning in, in order to radically change itself. Actually, it is the same living being that is involved, but then it is completely new in a structural change. This transformation is what interested me most of all as an artist”. Quotation Black Forest
For the PUPA edition, he has now reduced this to the elementary understanding of what constitutes the picture for him: he instrumentalizes graphism, which functions quite differently in the charcoal drawing than, for example, in those works with the three primary colors.
What is also added for Schwarzwald here is, on the one hand, this organic Baroque that has always interested and fascinated him – which was influenced by it in his youth in the baroque city of Salzburg – and, on the other hand, the simultaneously obvious opposite to it: namely minimalism, where form becomes so strict that clarity sets in. “However, I have a penchant for both and I also believe that the two belong together somehow. I’ve always been interested in bringing things together that don’t belong together. I think that is also one of the tasks of art to bring things together that don’t belong together”. Black Forest quote
Text: Lucas Cuturi
Opening on 11.03.2014 at 19:00h
Exhibition duration 11.03. – 10.04.2014
Project Space Lucas Cuturi, Neustiftgasse 107/5, 1070 Vienna, Austria
