André Deloar: Restricted Views
25 May—16 June 2018
They are segments of architecture; reduced, fragmented parts of buildings, fixed to a defined view, which express their pure form. In generous and two-dimensional panel painting in acrylic and oil on canvas, very modern, design-like images of building elements emerge. The dormant structures, monolithically rooted in their silent surroundings and growing as if by natural law, radiate pure, sculptural existence.
Deloar works from real models. After a drawing or photograph of the selected view of a building, he reconstructs it in fictitious completion as a model in wood, cardboard or the like. The outer, visually available part of the form is thereby fixed, and it is supplemented—speculatively—by the non-visible parts. In this subjunctive, the paintings are created, which in turn highlight individual elements of a complex architectural structure or reduce the buildings to torsos.
The effect of Deloar's perspective, distance and segmentation and the liberation from dedication to a purpose and its connotation shift the elements from their originally real functional to their purely formal existence. The intention of this selection—for example in the case of a projecting overhang, an irregular stack, a rounding, opening, covering or boundary—remains anonymous. The only thing that generates the image are the lines, surface structures and areas that define the perspective.
And above all the colour. In the works, colour becomes a building material and in the recognisable gesture of the powerful application of paint, a constructive movement can be discerned: Strip upon strip, claddings of boards are created, walls are erected in the filling of a surface, broad lines become edges, columns and joints. The coloured surfaces—partly accentuated in light green, red or yellow light—form singular structures that transfer the statics and dynamics of building onto the picture surface.
Architecture reduced to formal appearance, partly abstracted, is an attractive theme in modernist painting. In contemporary painting, the building appears as a sculpture, a utopia in a sketchy manner or a formula of the spirit of the age. Jens Hausmann peels out of the reduction the auratic effect of buildings as icons of human creation in the tradition of Le Corbusier, Steffi Deparade-Becker fragments the buildings into abstract colour and light gradients and Walter Eisler, in his deserted city and industrial scenes, directs the view to the building itself as an existential creature.
When is the boundary crossed from the joined material, from the building-body as a mere formal dimension to a human place, to an ambitious building with character and soul? Vitruvius wrote in the 1st century BC in »De Architectura« about the mother of all arts, based on the principles of stability [firmitas], usefulness [utilitas] and beauty [venustas], thus leaving the evaluation of buildings to two-thirds subjective discretion.
Deloar operates precisely in front of this boundary between formatted building material and dedicated building. His walls, corners, columns, projections, façades and towers are depicted as bodies and surfaces with reduced reference to their surroundings, without essential contexts, without people. The artist's paintings [and objects] ask about this ambivalent understanding of buildings, ask whether it is the viewer's point of view, the degree of completeness, the recognisable function, a social, individual or cultural intention, or a demonstration of zeitgeist that allows a potential function to arise from the image. He succeeds convincingly in the reversal: how much and what must be removed from a building in order for it to detach itself from its dedication and concentrate into a geometric object.
—By Tina Simon
______________
Dr. phil. Tina Simon
Author and publicist, Leipzig
André Deloar *1975 in Freiberg/Saxony, DE, lives and works in Zurich, CH
2014-2017 Master's degree in Fine Arts, Zurich University of the Arts [ZHdK], Zurich, CH
2000-2005 Diploma studies, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, Bauhaus Dessau, DE
Deloar works from real models. After a drawing or photograph of the selected view of a building, he reconstructs it in fictitious completion as a model in wood, cardboard or the like. The outer, visually available part of the form is thereby fixed, and it is supplemented—speculatively—by the non-visible parts. In this subjunctive, the paintings are created, which in turn highlight individual elements of a complex architectural structure or reduce the buildings to torsos.
The effect of Deloar's perspective, distance and segmentation and the liberation from dedication to a purpose and its connotation shift the elements from their originally real functional to their purely formal existence. The intention of this selection—for example in the case of a projecting overhang, an irregular stack, a rounding, opening, covering or boundary—remains anonymous. The only thing that generates the image are the lines, surface structures and areas that define the perspective.
And above all the colour. In the works, colour becomes a building material and in the recognisable gesture of the powerful application of paint, a constructive movement can be discerned: Strip upon strip, claddings of boards are created, walls are erected in the filling of a surface, broad lines become edges, columns and joints. The coloured surfaces—partly accentuated in light green, red or yellow light—form singular structures that transfer the statics and dynamics of building onto the picture surface.
Architecture reduced to formal appearance, partly abstracted, is an attractive theme in modernist painting. In contemporary painting, the building appears as a sculpture, a utopia in a sketchy manner or a formula of the spirit of the age. Jens Hausmann peels out of the reduction the auratic effect of buildings as icons of human creation in the tradition of Le Corbusier, Steffi Deparade-Becker fragments the buildings into abstract colour and light gradients and Walter Eisler, in his deserted city and industrial scenes, directs the view to the building itself as an existential creature.
When is the boundary crossed from the joined material, from the building-body as a mere formal dimension to a human place, to an ambitious building with character and soul? Vitruvius wrote in the 1st century BC in »De Architectura« about the mother of all arts, based on the principles of stability [firmitas], usefulness [utilitas] and beauty [venustas], thus leaving the evaluation of buildings to two-thirds subjective discretion.
Deloar operates precisely in front of this boundary between formatted building material and dedicated building. His walls, corners, columns, projections, façades and towers are depicted as bodies and surfaces with reduced reference to their surroundings, without essential contexts, without people. The artist's paintings [and objects] ask about this ambivalent understanding of buildings, ask whether it is the viewer's point of view, the degree of completeness, the recognisable function, a social, individual or cultural intention, or a demonstration of zeitgeist that allows a potential function to arise from the image. He succeeds convincingly in the reversal: how much and what must be removed from a building in order for it to detach itself from its dedication and concentrate into a geometric object.
—By Tina Simon
______________
Dr. phil. Tina Simon
Author and publicist, Leipzig
André Deloar *1975 in Freiberg/Saxony, DE, lives and works in Zurich, CH
2014-2017 Master's degree in Fine Arts, Zurich University of the Arts [ZHdK], Zurich, CH
2000-2005 Diploma studies, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, Bauhaus Dessau, DE