Reduction, Variation, and Excess

A horizontal line crosses a vertical one, then another, and another, vertically, horizontally. The lines form a solid base, provide a sense of proportion, give the eye something to hold on to. In a contrasting togetherness they form grids striving outward in all directions, sensory images of control and predictability that, within a paradoxical reconciliation of opposites, prove to be prototypes of transformability and openness for any chosen content, an ideal-typical framework for all kinds of modifications, ventures, experiments. Some lines run criss-cross, while others, in their delicacy, run into the unknown, into a faint whirring, floating, sensing. The mesh of lines is just a beginning. Layer by layer, Franz Türtscher’s precisely composed paintings pile up into shoreless image spaces, the complexity of which condenses into opaque surfaces, a free-floating carpet of virtual points of contact, lines of argumentation, inconsistencies, guiding threads. Webs line up next to webs, patterns next to patterns, the front and backgrounds become interchangeable, and can lapse at any time. Diagonals, folds and slants cross the overall image, suggesting a spacial depth, creating tension, introducing a moment of irritation. The grids continue through the space, leap from one image to the next, overlap, repeat, change, interlock, spill over into sculptural elements, eventually turning into sculptures. Vertical and horizontal formats, image spaces, image bodies, image dice, image modules form a sort of construction kit that follows the principle of the clear-cut OPEN FRAMES (OFFENER RAHMEN) the elements of which are endlessly variable in their contrasting togetherness. The lines open up a multi-dimensional space, they are not just lines, but are plains, pathways, borders. They may at times tip to the left or the right, up or down, veer off, cause deviations or distortions, maybe even a pinch of discomfort, when the well-ordered vocabulary of forms seems to get out of hand, as if it wanted to draw attention to an entire world behind its surface. The lines and layers stand for themselves, they represent concepts, thought models, associations, theories, stories. And they represent contradictions: up and down, thick and thin, horizontal or vertical, digital and analogue, of this world and beyond. The letters and words, which mingle with the abstract forms in their bulky character, do their part: OPTION. ILLUSION. POETRY. NEVERTHELESS. INTUITION. WILL. CONTRADICTION. POSSIBILITY. ART. And then there are the colours, spaces of light, harmonies and dissonances that connect with and overlay others, tones of a polyphonic music that make abstract constellations and spacial structures, but also concrete landscapes and situations tangible. AS REAGNAT. AS NEABLAT. AS LUFTAT. Within the interplay of abstraction and concretion we are thrown back to our senses, our imagination. All the things that we can see and think in this world. EXPANDED PAINTING: image compositions that stretch out of the frame into the space, join with others, expand into architectural elements, onto carpets, furniture, sunlight flooded window panels, that cast their accents – in red, blue, green, violet – onto a colourful hustle and bustle in midst of snowdrifts. While the snowcat paints the LECH-GRID (LECH-RASTER) into the formerly pristine white, the distant impression takes hold that the slope re-enforcements have cast their shadows onto the valley. In the end, everything is in relation.

In the end, everything is in relation. After many years, in which our paths have crossed time and again, I think back to my first cooperation with Franz Türtscher in the context of an exhibition in Bregenz. Considering the formal qualities and thematic directionality of his works, the quote that I prefaced the accompanying text I had written back then with, has lost nothing of its accuracy to this day. With their alluring interplay of colours, patterns, and concepts, the works invite us to delve beyond the naked presence of their sensory appeal into other, supposedly obvious or even utopian spaces, and to connect with the here and now:

“We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.”

If the occidental culture has reached a point, in the sense of Michael Foucault, where the focus is less on linear models of development and progress and more on a profound understanding of complex spatio-temporal interrelationships, then a mode of thinking based on contradictions and polarities, such as one within the mutually exclusive categories of black or white, old or new, art or the banal, must also be deemed as obsolete. Considering the various perspectives and realities being juxtaposed and jumbled up, what is of importance are the very transitions and forms of both/and, that create the tension in Franz Türtscher’s works. Right-angled structures are crossed by slants and freehand impulses, and it remains open whether or not the colours, that appear so neatly lined up and yet in a random order, actually fit with one another in their polyphone togetherness. The same can be said for the chosen paintings from various work groups, that find themselves united in extensive arrangements, despite their diverging qualities. Every line, every tone, every work stands both for itself as well as within the accumulative interplay with others.

Where could we end up if we were let our associations run free? Franz Türtscher’s works invite audiences to try exactly this out. I start with one thought and build on it with another. Inevitably, every impression, every thought, every connection calls for the next. The dark horizontal bars create impressions of blacking, of words or eyes that could reveal too much. Much like the bars, someone’s arms could fold, expressing a reservation in the face of questions of meaning, a possible horizon, a potential turn. Unexpectedly, I cling to a vertical bar, the yellow of which reminds me of road markings that accompany me on my journey from A to B, while my hand becomes one with the steering wheel and the neon signs in the distance play their colourful games with my thoughts. My attention jumps to a strangely bent architecture on the far left, then on to the sky behind it, the deep blue contrast of which instantaneously calms me down. Hand in hand with the complementary goes its tilting effect. Time and again, I have to decide: which impression, which thought do I let into the foreground? Do I focus on the continuities or on the breaks, on the connecting or the dividing, on the conflict or on a possible solution and a step into the future? Do I rely on intellect or intuition? What do all these textures, networks, grids, coordinate systems, crosshairs, patchwork structures that expand into every direction mean? Should I even come to a conclusion – and if so: what are these images getting at?

With an almost corporally tangible immediacy and presence, Franz Türtscher’s works open up towards the viewer, as the interplay of overlapping harmonies and dissonances blurs into a multi-layered and voluminous pictorial whole. While the impression is conjured of a hectic situation brought to a standstill, this form of sensory overload could also be seen as an incitement to take a step back and breathe. At the point where our critical distance reaches its limits, we find ourselves thrown back to an exuberant heterogeneity and dynamic of a lived reality that pushes in from all sides. It is no coincidence that Franz Türtscher’s works often evoke windows or doors that refer to something that lies behind, something beyond the surface of the image, to other spaces and grander correlations. What unites these transitional and threshold figures is their sturdy frame that gives the works stability in the form of repeating horizontal and vertical foundational pillars, and thereby provides something of a sense of security. It creates the backbone of a series of sculptural image architectures, the title of which – OPEN FRAME – points to the gestures of opening and framing that challenge the traditional methods of a conservationist or aesthetic fencing in of completed works in favour an acknowledgement of artistic processes and pictorial acts as such.

In this respect, Franz Türtscher’s works directly connect to the principle of the “Ready-made,” founded by Marcel Duchamp in 1913, when he mounted a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool, thereby robbing it of its intended use. Of course, the object continued to fulfil its use, considering that it was the goal of the artist to express a new conceptual vision for art, one that refers less to the aesthetic particularities of a certain object, but rather to the context and the framework that it is presented and perceived in. What made Duchamp stand out was in no way just the supposedly simple yet genius act of turning an everyday object into an artwork simply by choosing it – a myth that art historians have only partially challenged to this day. Duchamp’s artifice consisted rather in linking the very simple act of choice (of an object or medium, a form, colour, etc.) with the quasi-complementary act of philosophical reflection on correlations that underlie the works on the one hand and into which they inscribe themselves on the other. What comes into play here are the many studies (on the history of perspective, modern physics, contemporary literature, everyday culture, etc.) that Duchamp built his concepts on, but also the conviction, expressed in a famous formula, that it is ultimately always the viewers themselves who impart a certain meaning to a piece of art. What may initially sound highly theoretical and demand a great amount of pre-existing knowledge is actually expressed by Duchamp in another body of work that he developed parallel to the Ready-mades and which can be seen as complementary to the “prefabricated” works: a large-format painting on glass, freely positioned in the room, the background of which is consciously left blank by Duchamp, in order to draw the attention of the viewers towards the world behind the static image horizon while at the same time confronting them with their own mirror image, so that they may become – as recipients with a very specific perspective – a part of the narrative of the image.

In an extrapolation of this radically new view of art, Franz Türtscher’s works not only connect to Duchamp’s conception of the image as a window, which fundamentally challenges the idea of an objective seeing through. They also do not give a preconceived view of any kind of landscape, reality, society, or art world behind them, but rather place the focus on the decisive horizon of choice. With his concept of EXPANDED PAINTING, Franz Türtscher takes this idea further by conceiving his works as a game with interchangeable elements that invites viewers to explore further imaginary perspectives and constellations beyond the concrete arrangements themselves. In this case, the principle of the ready-made is not only relevant in respect to a selection of image modules or works. It also informs the work process in that the artist, with practical humour, uses standard masking tape rather than metering rule and pencil to define the dimensions of the individual pictorial elements and develop a succinct visual language including a highly idiosyncratic typography.

In their fundamentally open-ended character, Franz Türtscher’s works are reminiscent of threshold objects, whose sense (in the double meaning of the French sens meaning both sense and direction) lies less in a specific content or statement, but much more in a spectrum of possible approaches and points of view, that becomes particularly prominent in the interplay of various works or work series. In their formal clarity and consistency, they not only refer to a tradition of concrete art, but also to a phenomenological approach that intertwines the levels of sensory and intellectual engagement. OPTION CORRECTION. KEEPING AT A DISTANCE. COURAGE. POETRY. ON EQUAL TERMS. What Jacques Lacan claims about the image/screen as a place of withdrawal, becomes an experience in Franz Türtscher’s EXPANDED PAINTING:

“That which is light looks at me, and by means of that light in the depths of my eye, something is painted—something that is not simply a constructed relation, the object on which the philosopher lingers—but something that is an impression, the shimmering of a surface that is not, in advance, situated for me in its distance. This is something that introduces what was elided in the geometral relation—the depth of field, with all its ambiguity and variability, which is in no way mastered by me. It is rather it that grasps me, solicits me at every moment, and makes of the landscape something other than a landscape, something other than what I have called the picture.”

As abstract and inaccessible as Franz Türtscher’s works may seem at first glance, by the same measure, blossom in their effect within the concrete moment. Indeed, on closer inspection, the neatly arranged lines sheer out in every direction, and within the spectrum of the carefully coordinated colours that appear so well ordered, in the end no system can be found. An abstract pattern, black on white, finally speaks my mother tongue. LUAGA. LOSA. SCHWAEZA. The colourful barcode nearby is not at a loss of any price. While the works unfold their undoubted effect, the philosopher doubts sovereign concepts that could distract from the quiet trickle of surfaces. Much like a jackdaw, feeling and dancing around the mountain, our keen attention may dive into Franz Türtscher’s archive of interplays.

Translation: Christopher Hütmannsberger

Biography

Sarah Kolb is an art theorist and curator who lives and works in Linz and Vienna. Within her project Topologies of Artistic Research she is investigating relational knowledge models in art and theory at the University of Arts Linz. She is a founding member of the transdisciplinary network Mycelial Space and of Viktoria – Space for Artistic Research and Social Design in Vienna. More information can be found at: www.relational-knowledge.net.