SCOPE 2013

10. Juni - 16. Juni 2013

FIRST VIEW
Mon, June 10th: 1pm - 9pm
Tues, June 11th: 1pm - 9pm

SHOW HOURS
Wed, June 12th: 11am - 9pm
Thurs, June 13th: 11am - 8pm
Fri, June 14th: 11am - 8pm
Sat, June 15th: 11am - 8pm
Sun, June 16th: 11am - 7pm


SCOPE BASEL Pavilion
Uferstraße 40
4057 Basel, Sitzerland

Stand C 05

Alberto Storari

*1957 in San Bonifacio

Even if fine art has divided itself up into so many different directions (“Isms”) at the beginning of modernity, the two polar positions that appeared back then are still relevant: the reduction/abstraction of the perceptible to a pictorial and lingual minimum on the one hand and its expansion, including the dimensions of the un- and subconscious.
Alberto Storari’s work ties into the latter category, he distorts “real” images (photographs taken on his many short and long distance journeys) through the use of different techniques (painting, drawing, etching) and different support materials (tin foil, damast fabrics, silk papers,...) so much that the dimensions of the surreal, the imaginary seem to open up.
The subject, place and time (of the day) the pictures were originally taken are only partly and rudimentally visible, and through this the whole of the images eludes a clear definition. Storari decontextualises the real image that we are used to in such a way that he provides enough reference points for us to try, no – for us to want to recontextualise what he shows us. Where elements of the real image are obscured, erased, deformed and isolated from their context, new sensations are created, that are also associable with the perception of reality: far-sighted apparitions of light, night spaces or fog-like indifferences appear as well as near-sighted wall and pattern structures, translucent layers of colour or, as in his page-by-page reworkings of a printed copy of Hermann Mellville’s novel “Moby Dick”, written characters.
Never does Alberto Storari cross over the line to the completely un-representational, it is more as if he is offering us “impressions” taken out of the huge field of possible perceptions of nature, city, culture..., and of time and space. Where the logic of (central) perspective spatial constructions (e.g. of the photographic image) starts to blur, spaces of multi-perspective perception and experience open up, that can lead from the ephemeral now to the remembered past as well as the underlying parts of our memory-archives, that are arranged differently from logical and scientific criteria. Storari’s “Log Books” are therefore chronicles and reflections of his own experience and impressions as well as guides to our very own spaces of experience, lying hidden in our bunts.

Lucas Gehrmann, 2013

Andrej Pirrwitz

* 1963 in Dresden

Probably it isn’t the etudes that are tempophile, but the person excercising them. The term “Tempophilia” is used analogous to Bachelard’s term of "Topophilia".

"Sometimes one believes to know time, even if one only knows a series of spatial immobilisations of static being, a being that does not want to elapse, that wants to suspend the flow of time even in history, in search of lost time. In its thousands of honeycombs, space saves condensed time. That is what space is for." Gaston Bachelard: "The Poetics of Space"

Much like in painting, photography creates a two dimensional space, that forms a window into the artist’s world. As opposed to painting, photography is a physical interplay with time. One becomes the director of space-time. It is not the subject, the place or the point in time the shot was taken, but the course of time itself during the process of shooting and its expressed two dimensional structure: Life-size, exposure with lighting suitable to the picture and – if at all possible – in an appropriate space, on the right wall.

My desire to design the two-dimensional space and its colour structure not only through my choice of picture detail leads me to colour objects and sections of real space, to remove or permute objects and later, when taking the photo, to move them around. Not only the objects are moved, but the figures in the photographs are also moving. Through their being in space and their movement in time, they create what is actually the space, the leave colourful traces that settle as a “space-time-distillate”, my photograph.

My choice of motif is a consequent search for the feeling of irreality.

(Andrej Pirrwitz, 2010)

Tilmann Zahn seeks out locales avoided by others: The shabby and inhospitable dark sides of the gliitering world of consumer society. His path takes him to freight depots, industrial parks, loading stations; to places where wares are manufactured and distributed, in bulk and in containers encrusted with the grime of travel and the sweat of physical work. Zahn‘s tool-like forms are symbols of lost, inaccessible knowledge. This touches on a social reality: The individual participates only fragmentarily in the knowledge of his time; new knowledge is constantly won, old knowledge lost. In Tilmann Zahn‘s work, the tool whose function has been lost is like a key without a door. The lock to which the key belongs can at best be imagined and with it, innumerable possible spaces of thought and imagination. It is as if Tilmann Zahn‘s paintings opened up an extremely sensitive space with a pair of rusty pliers.

(Excerpts: Alexandra Deutsch: Isolde Schmidt/Ulrike Hauser-Suida; Stefan Saffer: Susanne Neubauer; Reinhard Wöllmer: Heidi Bierwisch; Tilmann Zahn: Alice Henkes)