maess.eu
Warschau | Polen
excessive
ausstellable
Zeichnungen
Ausstellung vom 4. bis 25. September 2009
Excessive, L’esthetique de la Rupture is a title of yet another exhibition of the works of Maess – an artist not really noted in Poland but very much in demand West of the Oder river. The exhibition held in Berlin is focused on the process in which the precursor becomes its own successor/epigone. This process, vital for powerful artists, here is presented as a difficult battle between two great forces. As a result of that clash several works of art are created. The drawings, full of elegant, light and expressive lines, which are far from imitating digital or typographic simplification, are accompanied by frames from Last Tango in Paris by Bertolucci. It is both one of the inspirations/reference points here and one of the progenitor of the series, which makes the relationship between Bertolucci’s work and the drawings by Maess quite troublesome. It is not just a simple takeover as the artist consciously uses the chosen fragments as traces of broader narration, while transforming them at the same time. This way for example the glowing crimson red in some of her drawings derives from, among all, the blood of the dead lover – the phantasm from the last scene. The strategy here is the analysis of the border separating drawing and film without the mediation of animation or comic strip, and Maess seems to hale been using it both with pleasure and successfully for some time now. But this is just one of the artist’s tricky riddles, along with somewhat provocative virtuosity of the line, connected with a particularly ascetic technique.
This series of drawings is also the first in a long while (to be precise, since Portografia) in which a color is introduced. Here, however it does not serve to emphasize saudade, although this notion is still valid; the red has a much more basic role. The artist herself calls the method „danse macabre of red and black”. It means a clash of pinturas negras, representing the fear of being trapped in fetishistic repetition, clean an mechanical, with the glowing red, the explosion of creative energy, being an end and a clinamen at the same time, which makes place for the new forms of life. It is a playful/willful/perverse error she interprets as an explosion of re-creation. The main stake in this game is artistic immortality, contrary to Beckett’s “to be an artist is to fail as no other fail.” Of course this strategy is by no means free from narcissism, but also narcissism is a tool in Maess’s hands. Her drawings have something of the character of ivy or spider’s web: their content is dense, they themselves are concentric, coherent and firm. They absorb everything in their proximity. Any metaphors on the way, or just close to it, fall their prey.
Text from Michał Fopp
Maess born in 1982 in Warsaw. Studied at Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw and at ESAD in Portugal.
