Solarium

“To be natural is such a difficult pose to keep up” O. Wilde, An Ideal Husband.

David Renggli’s pieces could be understood as by-products of a cultural misunderstanding. Clashes between valid and adulterated archetypes, they play on conflicts between “primary” sensory perception and the impulse to categorise into an aesthetic and symbolic order. Interweaving orthodox references to modernism, classical statuary, industrial and decorative design, as well as local folklore and the world of ethnographic museums, Renggli’s pieces draw attention to how objects gain and gradually lose meaning. And this in accordance with an acculturating context, of which they intensify the element of contingency and put norms out of balance through a double bind principle. “For how much you believe in something that you don’t believe in ?”.

At first sight, these series of sculptures and paintings would seem to assert a conventional unity and stability, but this is in order better express the confusion that links the artist and his model. The Floorplan Desire Paintings, acrylic paintings and silkscreen prints on wood, made through a method involving the superimposition of coloured layers question the tradition and authority of abstract painting (from hard-edge to modernist primitivism), which were long ago absorbed by the decorative principles of interior design. Never lapsing into parody, these paintings imply several perceptional engagement levels, several degrees of illusion and composition that validate them on a strictly pictorial level. Here, a grid made of hessian canvas becomes an autonomous structural motif while asserting itself as an illusionist tool, misleading us into thinking that the painting can be perceived as an expansion of the weft of the flax canvas. This resolutely “haptic” movement of penetration and withdrawal of belief in the form, in the wake of Duchamp’s erotic of perspective, is one of the work’s active principles. This is what gives it its poetic character, contradicting the scepticism that emanates from it, the “misunderstanding” becoming a way to thwart insinuation. The artist’s experiments with metallic solder generated a new repertoire of abstract sculptures. The “Fake Bronze” works, exhibited on plinths, consist in a paradoxical hybridisation between the vocabulary of the mask or primitive totem (and its revival in the modern bronze tradition) and the spirit of an amateur walder. Like most of his sculptures covered with a layer of car-body paint, they operate through the tension between traces of laborious manual work and an almost industrial finish, in order to complicate understanding of the artist commitment expressed by these works.

The gestural heroism repeatedly subverted in his work on “lyrical” abstraction is followed by the “performance” of a sabre cut, a mixture of the folklore of chainsaw wood sculpture competitions and the refined tradition of Japanese culture that influences so many modern “masters”. Through their title, the American Gigolos two-colour sculptures made of resin blocks with “low definition” contours refer to the tradition of the nude, in its campiest sense. They play on the analogy with figure/plinth arrangements from classical sculpture, reducing the language of the figure to a minimum. Perceived as a whole or an object, they undergo multiple metamorphoses in order to imply various utilitarian registers (here a telephone, a pacifier, a rubber stamp?) or obscene derivations from a sexual subtext. By presenting them as ironic variations on the theme of demiurgic creation (“sculpting from a block”) and originality, Renggli brings into coexistence the mark of an innocent, pure, spontaneity and that of a “moment” which is always manufactured, falsified, and therefore culturally meaningful. Any internal value is thereby refuted, the works having been conceived as envelopes whose consistence stems from the superimposition of a series of ceaselessly renewed “first impressions”, limiting perception of the work to a sum of ephemeral bursts of intensity, of déjà-vu. Pushing the notion of “artistic” vagueness to the point of a methodical absurdity, it is ultimately the foundations of our perceptual system, governed as it is by the cultural paradigm of surface and appearance, that the works both mime and destabilise. Confronted up close and from a far by an image of distance, we are experimenting here with a kind of phenomenology of superficiality.

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these halftones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

Fernando Pessoa

When looking at the exquisite drawings of Andrew Mania one struggles to find a word to neatly sum them up. In fact, there is a word in Portuguese, Saudade, with no comparable word in English, which seems far more appropriate than anything else. It describes a state of mind so much more precisely than any English word that I know: that deep state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. That longing for impossible things, for the past, for ancestral roots in another country in which one has never lived, for other possibilities, is suggested in Mania’s work, just as it is in the words of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa above.
Like classical sculptures of the Greek hero / god Antinous the fresh-faced youths in Mania’s drawings are almost impossibly handsome, but unlike Antinous’ tragic likeness or Dorian Gray’s mirror, these drawings fix their subjects at a moment in time from which their real looks can only fade. Mania’s series of drawings of a friend in a pink wig taking ‘selfies’ capture that contemporary narcissistic curse of the obsession with images of the self. In the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, the eponymous young man is so fixated upon himself that he drowns when lured to a pond that reflects his image to himself, declaring that his beauty would never be sufficiently appreciated and so he commits suicide. By turning these photographs into beautifully-rendered drawings on wood boards Mania fixes the momentary, obsessive digital image into something permanent that could last as long as a Renaissance portrait of a nobleman. He subverts and complicates not only the transitory nature of the picture, but also the narcissism, by turning it into a considered and mediated artwork. There is a Neo-Romantic quality to Mania’s work that puts him into a tradition of draughtsmanship dating back to the 1930s, 40s and before – the work from this time by artists such as John Minton, Lucian Freud, Pavel Tchelitchew and Christian Berard. Their work was precise and yet had this same atmosphere of saudade. Nostalgia seems to be the wrong word to describe work that is so contemporary, and yet it is intangibly present in Mania’s drawings.

And also the qualities of magic realism, like the intense eyes that root his assemblage into an unsettling but playful duality of figurative and abstract. There is a sense of visual poetry that underpins Mania’s work, which is carried lightly in the assemblages just as in Joseph Cornell’s boxes. But this poetic feeling converges with the Neo-Romanticism of Mania’s drawings, and makes me think of another ancient Greek myth that was to inspire the poet John Keats: Endymion. Bestowed by Jupiter with the gift of perpetual youth, united with perpetual sleep, Endymion was beloved by Diana the Goddess of the Moon who guarded his flock of sheep whilst he slept. In the words of Thomas Bullfinch, We see in Endymion the young poet, his fancy and his heart seeking in vain for that which can satisfy them, finding his favourite hour in the moonlight, and nursing there beneath the beams of the bright. and silent witness the melancholy and ardour which consumes him. The story suggests aspiring and poetic love, a life spent more in dreams than reality…