CONSTANTIN LUSER - SOLO

“Everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news.” (David Forster Wallace, Infinite Jest)

Constantin Luser’s graphic work extends the expressive potential of the medium by transgressing the boundaries of the genre and incorporating the spatial dimensions of the object and installation, as well as the auditory discipline of music.

At the start of the year, visitors at Kunsthalle Krems were wowed by Luser’s installation of a ‘total drawing’ whose complexity goes beyond our ability to grasp it. Resembling ongoing movements of thought, the linear wall drawings at the Jette Rudolph Gallery have now come face to face with their wire counterparts, installed in a way that has them floating in space.

The openness of Luser’s lines visually interconnects the graphic dimensions so that, as viewers pass by, they constantly recombine, taking on new fleeting forms and meanings. Luser’s wire artworks thus exemplify the notion of an infinite line. Made of filigree brass wire and fine brass thread that has been shaped into wide arches, the objects freely float in space, each of them self-contained so that it is impossible to see where they begin and end.

The objects’ permeability makes them look like virtual projections, while their suspension from select attachment points in the ceiling adds movement by producing gentle rotations. As a result, what viewers see constantly changes as the variability underlying each graphic body is revealed: They see a series of elements running the gamut from the figurative form of a head – sometimes with, sometimes without glasses – accompanied by a proportionately undersized house, animals, organs, and fantastic machines, up to numbers perched on the ends of long, antenna-like wires. These numbers have been placed inside tiny circles that makes it look as though they were exponents of a structural order potentially inherent within them.

Because the objects constantly rotate, viewers can only assign meaningful significance to them on a moment-to-moment basis and their interpretations will necessarily always be partial interpretations. This is due to the fact that the artist visually frames these three-dimensional graphic bodies by supplying them with their analogs drawn in black fineliner pen on the walls behind them. His wall drawings seek situational points of contact with the wire objects in the form of passages, so as to provide pertinent commentary, dialog or free associations. In the process, objects and drawings overlap on the level of the signifier and thereby create a new power from the two linear codes.

By having these temporary, contingent and mutable levels of meaning overlap, Luser is rejecting the dimension of referentiality that is anchored in reality. Instead, his ‘graphic totality’ celebrates the infinite system of comprehensive relationships, combinations and simulations. He keeps ever-emerging relations in flux and enables diverse approaches to interpretation – instead of merely presenting static facts. To this end, the artist deploys the semi-reflective, wide, large-format, panorama-like aluminum plates that further extend the reflective dimension of this space. At the same time, however, these plates in turn become drawing surfaces which integrate the projection on the wall with the wall drawing by having their lines overlap. But what happens when you set yourself up as a mirror to reflect the infinite system that comprises the total drawing, thereby doubling it and, in the sense of Baudrillard, turning it against yourself? In the culmination of the interwoven lines, it becomes ambivalent, radically tautological and a self-sufficient sphere with its own perception mechanisms. Along the lines of Baudrillard, one can speak of a study that explores the infinite quality of the system of artistic expression, both in terms of its mediality and its potential meaning, which Luser explores as a tautological reversal to the point of self-dissolution.

Luser’s all-around installations recall “the movement, the dynamics of form, whereby reality is determined as a conglomerate of transitory surfaces and objects, which have the potential to shift.” (Bourriaud, Nicolas: Radikant, Berlin 2009, p. 82)

So in this installation space, the artist proposes a dynamic, flowing representation, which engages viewers, asking them to be actively involved in the process of creating the composition, of unfolding the fragmentary units in relational terms. (cf. on methods for this type of presentation form: Bourriaud, Nicolas: Radikant, Berlin 2009.)

Opening: 17th september 2014, 18-22 hour

(Text: Jette Rudolph & Ellen Martin // Translation: Cathy Lara & Associates)