VERNISSAGE: DONNERSTAG, 9. FEBRUAR 2012, 19 BIS 21 UHR
PERFORMANCE UM 20 UHR: FABIAN FÜSS, MÉLINA AVOUAC
Wir freuen uns, das Werk der in Wien lebenden Künstlerin Mélina Avouac (*1982), die an der
Münchner Akademie bei Olaf Metzel studiert hat, erstmals in einer Einzelausstellung in der Galerie
Karl Pfefferle zu präsentieren. Mélina Avouac eignet sich die unerschöpfliche Bilderflut des World
Wide Web zeichnerisch an. Dabei nimmt sie wie ein Flaneur, ohne Eile oder bestimmtes Ziel,
Eindrücke auf, die spontan ihre Aufmerksamkeit erregen, und übersetzt sie in großformatige
Kohlezeichnungen, Wandreliefs oder Skulpturen. Indem sie in ihren Werkzyklen scheinbar
zusammenhanglos unterschiedlichste Bild- und Textzitate zu einer visuellen Lektüre verschränkt,
schafft sie ein komplexes eigenständiges Gefüge, das uns mit einer individualisierten Bildwelt
jenseits des schnellen Konsums konfrontiert.
In French, consommer means at once to consume and to consummate. Speaking linguistically, to
consume something as a consumer, also implies that one finishes, completes or perfects the product -
that one makes the union between production and consumption complete through an intercourse.
Our definitions have slipped along with our reality - anything can be produced, therefore anything
can be consumed. The internet as a tireless machine of pluralistic and endless production that lets
flow a public flood of images. Sight is vulnerable. Target the eyes. They will consume faster than
mouths.
And so Mélina Avouac intercepts here, between the circuit of production-consumption, and allows a
third function to regain and transcend its power: recording. Like a bricoleur who makes use of only
what is at hand, she pulls digital information down from it's intangible realm and gives it form
again, imprisoning it in the physical realm from which it had once escaped.
Continuing her cycle of drawings that the artist had begun some years ago, she now adds largescale
charcoal drawings to this cauldron. Though a trained sculptor and a self-labelled conceptual
artist, the skills of a drawer are exhibited here through brushstroke-like structures, concentrated and distributed layers of charcoal and untouched white borders and surfaces.
So rather than consuming blindly, Avouac consummates these hand-picked signs and images by
giving them a more private singularity within a contextualised series/plane, and, so, seeks to finish,
complete and perfect them. Rather than letting them drown in a sea of information, she seeks to make
their union with us complete through artistic intercourse...
As if Avouac were at work constructing and adding to her own plane; a plane of rhizomatic
connections where everything can be connected to everything, where depth and height are replaced
by surface and breadth (a plane of consistency?), a plane that does not allow for hierarchy.
Transcendence would only be a product of this plane. A plane of immanence? A schizophrenic's
table... "Once noticed, it continued to occupy one's mind. It even persisted, as it were, in going about
its own business...The striking thing was that it was neither simple nor really complex, initially or
intentionally complex, or constructed according to a complicated plan. Instead, it had been
desimplified in the course of its carpentering... As it stood, it was a table of additions, much like
certain schizophrenics' drawings, described as 'overstuffed,' and if finished it was only in so far as
there was no way of adding anything more to it, the table having become more and more an
accumulation, less and less a table... It was not intended for any specific purpose, for anything one
expects of a table." (Henri Michaux)
Kenneth Maennchen, Düsseldorf 2012