calendario eventi  :: 

X

16/9/2014

Robert Janitz

Meyer Riegger, Berlin

In the paintings and sculptural works of Robert Janitz (*1962), surfaces are the membranes of memory and description. The composition of his large-scale paintings involves flat, curving brushwork, and yet it is the realm of colour itself which Janitz explores in his painting, lending it a haptic shape. He mixes his paints with wax, flour and pigments, and they develop volume on the cardboard or canvas support of his pictures, extending as a mass outwards into three-dimensionality. On the painted surface, as also on the sculptural surface. Janitz conceives of the surface and its continuous development as a locus. It evolves into concrete structures and turns the structural into a subject, a site, and not least a metaphor of painting itself within his own abstract painting; but not without being sensual. Janitz´s wide and almost coarse brushstrokes are condensed gestures of living and arrival, they are movements, which cannot exist as a figure or subject.

His smaller-format portraits also take up this gesturality. They show the sketched outlines of bodies, faces concealed under streaks of paint, people seen from behind, their faces turned away, glancing aside. They show moments that are not ready to be shown. They make allusions, hint at situations, images, the sensual, which surrounds us without a concrete shape or visual expression.
The oxymoron which Robert Janitz generates between image and language, between the visual presence and the titles of his paintings is a similar gesture. Text excerpts or terminology derived from literature, theatre, poetry or everyday life are attached to his painting like a hashtag, which sets situative reference points but leaves the narration of the picture to its own devices. Janitz uses words as forms, and his forms in turn develop a language that eludes the grammar of order. Texture becomes the scene that tells a story, much like texts that narrate scenes. Abstracted and conceptual, they create footnotes, which refer to thoughts and situations, connections and inspirations in a hybrid manner.

Text: Christina Irrgang
Translation: Zoe Claire Miller

Image: Robert Janitz, Jellyfish: be careful soon they will take over the weltherrschaft, 2014. Oil, wax on linen, 264 x 203 cm

Meyer Riegger Berlin
Friedrichstrasse 235, D-10969 Berlin
Tuesday - Saturday 11.00 - 18.00

stampa

permanent link