I. Unplaced Bodies – Painting as a Condition

With around twenty-five works, the exhibition Viscous City offers an overview of Evelyn Plaschg’s paintings, in which the artist explores the medium of painting itself and its conventions and contemporary pictorial worlds, so as to attain her own new forms of representation and composition. The idea of figuration is fundamental, and the work of this Austrian artist is situated in a fascinating intermediary realm consisting of a very basic form of representation. Her pictures alternate between physical presence and formal twists, as her f igures are often only depicted as fragments and in vague and unpersonal forms. The silhouettes in her pictures seem to be without clear parameters, and they are vulnerable and direct. These anonymous bodies are not depicted as the bearers of any individual identity, but are rather divorced from any specific biographical detail. They are faceless, often nameless, and frequently reduced to a pose, a fragment of part of the body, or just focused on a single gesture. They stand less for a specific person and more for conditions and states; they can be projection surfaces, images of collective experience, or expressions of inner tension. Plaschg very deliberately avoids any narrative clarity, and her views of bodies, and in more recent works also of objects and fragments of buildings, reject classical designs; instead they open up to an ambiguous space, where inner sentiments, urges, and vulnerabilities become images. Plaschg works references to photographs into a form of figuration that refuses and works against classical concepts of images and portraits of people and the appertaining notions of identity, or the direct representation of an object or room that can be read in terms of its appearance. Plaschg is here equally concerned with social issues and with the status of painting.

With the advent of photography in the nineteenth century, painting increasingly lost its function as a depiction of the world, and thus its need to represent something real. This loss of purpose was a catalyst for abstraction. Artists began to turn away from figuration, and to instead focus on inner states of mind, moods, and formal matters. Painting thus acquired a new autonomy beyond mere reproduction. In the digital and social-media age, depictions of bodies are gaining a new significance within accelerated processes of image production. Online, bodies are ubiquitous, transformed by image processing methods. Filters, poses, and aesthetics create normed and arbitrary representations that render individuality vague. The anonymous body becomes a symbol of self-enactment, optimization, and also alienation. 

The exhibition Viscous City draws on existing works from the past six or seven years, combined with new works, so that both the development and the range of Plaschg’s oeuvre are shown, including her recent interest in the theme of urban spaces, all within an exhibition that explores the body in the medium of painting in diverse contemporary variations. This exhibition shows how Plaschg’s focus has shifted to other forms and genres in painting. After her focus on bodies that completely reject representation, Plaschg turns to urban spaces and especially objects, some of which stand for an interest in systemic structures such as transportation and urban infrastructure, while others focus on micro-details in extreme close-up as indexical representations of the way we live. It is conspicuous that identical objects occur in many of these works — stacks of trays, grapes on a vine, and heads in vague environments. They all share a certain one-dimensionality and monotony; their recurrence is part of our contemporary lives. The artist’s use of oil paint stands in stark contrast to this, as this not only defamiliarizes the motifs but also transforms them into purely formal idioms that always contain allusions to abstract painting. This tension between monotonous motifs and their lively implementation give these pictures a strange and idiosyncratic dynamic. While the objects are depersonalized through serial repetition, forming network and grid structures, the way they are painted places them into states of dissolution that reinterpret them: they lose their functional purposes and become the bearers of moods, emotions, and formal reflection. The modus operandi in the realization of these motifs does not aim to reproduce them directly, but is rather firmly centered on the how. This is certainly the case for many different positions in the history of art and the present day, but Plaschg’s strategy nonetheless makes something special of each of her works. Particularly her most recent paintings oscillate between object and surface as if they were in some fluid state. This liminality indicates a central quality of these works: the simultaneity of the visual image and its dissolution in hard and soft forms, and a reduced color spectrum with a few shades of red and blue as a reflected moment of painting itself.