Erik A. Frandsen


Faurschou Beijing is very pleased to present the Danish artist Erik A. Frandsen and his first solo show in China.

Painting in the expanded field
Erik A. Frandsen is a painter who, like many of his contemporary colleagues, does not restrict himself to painting on a canvas. His paintings belong in an expanded field. Throughout his career Erik A. Frandsen has constantly, with great inventiveness and artistic sensitivity, gone beyond classic boundaries of painting. His paintings unfold either as installation or three-dimensional object – or as a reworking of painterly problems.

Different strategies
Erik A. Frandsen’s works thus encompass an array of different strategies and materials. In his early paintings he applied a variety of objects: Rockwool, lead, plastic trays, photos, eggs, steel wire, and neon tubes. This was done to avoid mere decoration, and to add a vehicle for meanings – or to block for them. He has become famous for his photo series taken of him and his wife embracing with lights affixed on their hands. The camera’s long exposure time transforms their caressing into white painterly strokes in the images. He has made statements in neon tubes; made paintings in the colour palette of photo negatives as well as lustrous exclusive mosaics made in the antique traditional style of Venetian smalti.

The duality
Erik A. Frandsen has always been interested in people and life, and he has an eye for strange stories and distorted views of reality. Thus the figurative is prominent in his art. However for Erik A. Frandsen art is a duality, or a “double space”, of figure and structure, positive and negative, physical objects and abstract forms challenging each other, and thus creating tension in his works.

“Frozen Moment Desert”
This duality is maintained in Erik A. Frandsen’s installation of his recent works at Faurschou Beijing. “Frozen Moment Desert” is an installation in two rooms.

One room is devoted to his steel works. Large steel plates are engraved with flower motives. They are literally ‘cool’ paintings done without any colour, canvas or brush, but ‘painted with a drill’. And they are truly “frozen moments” as the flowers are captured in a specific state of their short life.
The other room is a visual bombardment of colourful large format paintings. These images could be said to have been ‘painted with photographs’, as they have their origin in snapshots from the artist’s many travels where something seen or experienced is captured in a “frozen moment” by the camera and later reworked into these large scale paintings.

Memento-mori
Erik A. Frandsen’s beautiful stainless steel flowers are though not only decorative. It is easily detected, that they are simple wild flowers, weed, even cannabis, if not memorial wreaths from Sachen-Hausen or withering lilies.
In an art historical context the flower motive has sustained as a symbol of beauty, sensuality, life, death, and vanity, and Erik A. Frandsen has earlier applied the flower motive as an ambiguous symbol in his artistic exploration of intimacy, relationships, and home life.
His images with flowers are classic memento mori-motives – but in a new form. The cool steel reflects the flowers that are projected into the images, thus preventing the viewer from reflecting himself without at the same time seeing the flowers. In this way the works acquire an extra dimension when making the viewer aware of his own role in an art universe – thus connecting art and reality.

Images of a contemporary visual culture
Art and reality are likewise connected in the reworking of the photographic images from our everyday reality into the mediated reality of painting.
Erik A. Frandsen obviously points to a shift in the pictures expression and meaning when an episode of waiters washing out door chairs, are blown up to the format of almost 3 x 4 meter.

Many of Erik A. Frandsens images are of his wife and children and have the character of a personal family album, which they are not. The photographic reality is a constructed reality – which is what Erik A. Frandsen’s succeeds in making us pay attention to.
Everywhere in his images one finds symbols and objects from contemporary visual culture: Coca-Cola bottles, Marlboro cigarettes, Mickey Mouse, Spider Man, and the boxing gloves’ “Stars and Stripes”. It is a way of visual commentating that goes back to Rauschenberg’s and Warhol’s silk screens. In Erik A. Frandsen’s works these motifs are though not isolated, but recirculated as part of the visual reality of today.

With their humorous, unconventional, and astonishing contents, Erik A. Frandsen’s works are thought provoking. His choice of aesthetically beautiful materials such as mosaics in Venetian smalti, large scale paintings, or shiny engraved steel plates makes these existential moments both disturbing and an aesthetically pleasurable experience.

FAURSCHOU

Alex Lukas


White Walls is proud to present Alex Lukas in a solo show – And Another Shall Rise To Take Her Place.  Opening Reception Saturday, March 14th, 2009 from 7 – 11pm at 835 Larkin St., SF.   The show runs through April 3rd, 2009. 

Hailing from Cambridge, Massachusetts Alex Lukas attended RISD and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he frequents Space 1026 collaborating with creative and influential pals.  He also founded and contributes to Cantab Publishing.  Their website is full of handmade ‘zines and prints that make you laugh out loud with their quirky antics, but also inspire respect for screen print and handmade anything.  Once you get past Lukas’ extra curricula’s and get down to his work you realize that is he an expert at his craft, while the rest is just fun.   He is an artist that clearly lives for art, which is apparent in every intricately created landscape. With each piece, Lukas breaks down his work into integral layers made up of silkscreen, gouache, acrylic, ink, and spray paint.  Drawing from anonymous skylines of major cities Lukas’ landscapes are overwhelmed by the elements in which floods and fires sink and incinerate his buildings.  While Lukas’ painting can seem depressing, the title of the show implies hope.  And Another Shall Rise And Take Her Place will showcase not only Lukas’ knack for implying impending doom but also his ability to provide solace in the eventual replacement of all that is ruined.

White Wall



KRIS MARTIN


KRIS MARTIN

For his second solo exhibition at Johann König, Berlin, the Belgian artist Kris Martin has installed a hot air balloon in the gallery, entirely dissolving the architecture. As if ready for launching, the balloon and basket are lying on the floor. In the main space ventilators blow up the balloon until the subtly flittering fabric touches the walls. A surreal effect takes place as the visitors walk into the room through the balloon’s opening, as if entering a whale’s stomach.
In this way, Kris Martin takes on a Romantic theme: the dream of flying in an archaic vehicle. Powered solely with flames and hot air, the balloon floats over the earth without making almost any sound. The installation in the gallery space turns this metaphor for freedom into a downright claustrophobic fantasy. The balloon wants to fly, but the White Cube holds it firmly in place.
In the second smaller space, Kris Martin exhibits a photograph of the Matterhorn, which he bought at an image agency and slightly modified. Framing the photograph, the artist has changed the image so that the crest of the mountain is cropped. Only the way leading to the peak can be seen: the cumbersome route, the trying ascension, the life-risking venture – but goal vanishes behind the fog. Just as the hot air balloon, Martin makes use of an image with a strong symbolism. The Matterhorn is one of the few mountains in the world whose outline can immediately be recognized by many people, its contours standing for the longing to overcome existential limits.
“Martin explores his subjects with a particular mixture of melancholy, playfulness and elegance that is reminiscent of the work of artists such as James Lee Byars, Cerith Wyn Evans or even Félix González- Torres, with their intense awareness of the ephemeral and fragile, their minimal yet decadent visual styles and their Romantic, frequently humorous yet conceptually rigorous method”, writes Jens Hoffmann. Working within a conceptual tradition with different Media such as drawing, photography, collage, objects or Ready-made, Kris Martin’s work is characterized by its sensuous dimension. The artist often uses pre-codified material as a starting point, minimally transforming it so that the elements lose their original function. A blank space is created: A hot air balloon that doesn’t fly, a mountain whose tip has been hidden. It is within this emptiness where a space for imagination opens itself. The spectator can then take on the invitation to fill up this space with fantasy.

Kris Martin (*1972, in Kortrijk, Belgium) lives and works in Ghent. Solo exhibitions of the artist have taken place at the P.S.1 of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco as well as in the GAMeC in Bergamo, Italy, among others. The artist also participated in the group exhibition “Political/Minimal“ at the KW – Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. From the 18th of April, his work can be seen in the group exhibition “The Quick and the Dead“ at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In December 2009, the artist will have a solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum in Aspen, Colorado, USA.

Johann Koenig