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OR 12 c, 2022, Aluminum frame, various materials, 150 x 110 x 10 cm, Copyright: Eva Kelety

Spaces of Possibility

Hartwig Knack, October 2024

Franz Türtscher’s wall objects from the extensive series “Picture Architecture – Open Frame”, ranging from the relief-like to the three-dimensional, distinguish themselves first and foremost through their square, modular character. The early works of this series, created at the beginning of the 1990s, are preceded by detailed planning sketches. They contain indications of measurements accurate down to the millimetre as well as the material used for the individual components: acrylic glass, various coated particle boards, plywood, rubber, cork, and even polyester.

Later, acrylic paintings were created parallel to the wall objects, works that exhibit a similar but usually more nuanced horizontal and vertical structure and in their overall assessment can be classified as Concrete art. Sometimes, the individual fields of these canvasses are executed in white, black, and grey shades (COLOUR FIELDS – REGIONS), and sometimes in colour (GRIDS – SERIES A, ARRANGEMENT). It is striking that both the painterly motifs and—in particular—the three-dimensional wall objects open up at the top. With his “Open Frames” (the upper horizontal frame bar and the backing are absent), which Türtscher produces from conventional aluminium profiles, the artist calls into question the classic panel painting, whose essential elements include a flat, planar, and self-contained pictorial ground. Not only are the views past the coloured panels—spatially layered from front to back and sometimes overlapping—to the wall and the shadows resulting automatically from the construction important; the simultaneous opening into the room also elicits ideas of mobility and mutability.

Mark Rothko, one of the key figures of Abstract Expressionism in the USA, was of the opinion that pictures must be mysterious. Of some of his paintings divided into two or more colour fields, he remarked: “They are not pictures. I have made a place.” Like Rothko’s works, Türtscher’s “Open Frames” in my view also represent visual places that are quite easy to reach. Türtscher goes far beyond simply making pictures. With his geometrically layered structural orders, he creates on the one hand deep works of picture architecture marked by tranquillity and accessibility, but on the other also spaces of condensation and concentration that is worthwhile to engage with mentally or intellectually. These places manifested as pictures represent possibilities and offers that can be individually experienced and mentally altered.

Constantly recurring themes such as movement, openness, dynamic, and processuality characterise the “Open Frames”. Standing in front of the works as an exhibition visitor, one nearly succumbs to the temptation to intervene in the process of image dramaturgy and undertake one’s own arrangement of the coloured modules, which can be flexibly constructed and dismantled. Here, Türtscher touches on the borders of kinetic art, in which recipients assume the role of actors. Sometimes, individual coloured panels even stand unattached in the aluminium profiles of the frame, but only the artist is permitted to move them and translate them into new pictorial contexts at his own discretion.

“Mental rotation”, a term borrowed from experimental psychology, seems particular fitting with regard to these works. The emphasis here is on perception and the processing of information, on a mental operation that from the observation of two- or three-dimensional objects develops an idea of what perspective they would offer following a rotation. Or how two or more objects can be mentally shifted, how they can reposition themselves to each other, reflect each other or otherwise establish contact with one other.

Through this offer of a playful, mental rearrangement, Türtscher achieves with his statically well-balanced works a dynamization and rhythmization of movement in a space. Those of us interested in art mentally arrange a temporal movement process: what modules do I have to position, add or remove, and in what manner, in order to form a picture architecture that corresponds to my personal visions?