pool position #05

Ursula Badrutt Schoch. Painting is our passion. "6 x painting" – an exhibition
in the project space "exex".
Painting, painting, painting, painting, painting, painting in "exex" – six artists
(five women, one man) think and act with color.

In its presentations and events the project space "exex" accentuates the experimental and workshop-like. However, this does not prevent the organizers from making room for the classical medium of painting as well. And thus showing that painting is just as hip and experimental as "File Sharing" or "Come back".

Different

"6 x painting" shows painting as a great diversity - on walls and on the floor, from the panel picture through object-like photo images, installative wall paintings, all the way to painted objects as spatial intervention. The initiators Marianne Rinderknecht, Teresa Peverelli and Priska Oeler have invited Ueli Bänziger from Appenzell, Martina Gmür from Basel, and the Basel-based Leta Peer from Grisons to take up the question of the possibilities of painting in dialogue with their own work.

Ambivalent

There is the sign-like wall painting by Marianne Rinderknecht. The paint adheres to the surface of the white ground, dimensions of depth arising solely from the atmospheric effect. Sprinkled above a sky-blue cloud bumping into the ground, there are pink dots of spray like snowflakes in reflective clothing. The loose landscape very subtly turns into a world of obligatory gravity. Whether Marianna Rinderknecht sets up a glittering altar or intervenes in the space by painting in a very reduced manner, as in this case, with all the pleasure and lightness it is really a matter of turning sweetness into bitterness, superficial complacency into abysmal horror. Similarly reserved and ambivalently harmless is the rip by Martina Gmür (born 1979) coming around the corner. A black notch, it is actually an adhesive picture with a brush stroke, which can be removed and placed somewhere else. Beyond the reference to baroque illusionist painting, here an image of disruption is evoked, which questions its own actions as well as the explicit themes of painting and exhibition. Leta Peer shows a series of small format oil paintings with a grand and trivial theme: the mountain. Reversed field glasses focus on a myth with a gold edge. As a yearning for home, the mountain peaks of Unterengadin, painted from photos by the artist, remain at an unreachable distance. As they seem in danger of becoming lost, they specifically reinforce the yearning. We want to go close to these paintings, which dissolve into individual brush strokes as we approach. Leta Peer's mountain peaks remain unreachable. And it is for this very reason that they are so precious.

Slowly

Priska Oeler is interested in the interplay of "color" and "paint". Whether fish or paintbrush net work, her current paintings are as real as the balls of colorful household rubber once were, because they are color in layers, sometimes allowing the eye to recognize something figurative, sometimes oscillating into the associative. Differentiated color plants grow out of earthy chaos, dead fish almost come to life and caress vision with their magnificence. Teresa Peverelli continues the distinction between object and non-object with her painting too." I am interested in presence," she says and stages everyday objects in a still life bursting out of the frame. Single parts have enticingly poured themselves into the showcase, others belong to the arrangement on the floor, binding their counterpart with form, color and structure. With a play of shades of color they respond to Ueli Bänziger's paintings, which assume a position of unbroken abstraction as they remain ensnared in themselves. "Painting is our passion," say the painters of the project group. "And painting is slowness. With the painting exhibition, we want to be a brake in the hectic art business. Because painting is sensuousness and sensuousness takes time."

St.Galler Tagblatt, Monday, November 3, 2003