Meanwhile in FOX JENSEN McCRORY Gallery in AUCKLAND
No One’s Rose
OPENING
SATURDAY 26 SEPTEMBER
The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere. Paul Celan.
Artists : Jane Bustin, Sofie Muller, Aida Tomescu, Niyaz Najafov, Gideon Rubin, Liat Yassitor, Günter Umberg
The dislocation of language
Painting can dislocate vision, dismantling the structures we fervently believe we depend on to make sense of our visual world.
Amidst this reorganisation of vision, new structures can emerge that invert the very architecture of sight, opening vision to its symbolic, interpretive and metaphorical potential, quelling its orthodox role as mere facilitator of depiction.
Poetry, in the hands of Paul Celan, ferociously dismembered language, and with it, deprived us of the calm, illusory narratives we prefer, those stories and rhythms that we use to sanitise remembrance.
Amidst this, at times, brutal treatment of language Celan achieved a new and uncomfortable sensate measure for words that simultaneously elevated and contaminated them. Cleaven, raw, alkaline – Celan’s language functions as a flagrant conspirator in the delivery of menace and indecency. Perhaps it is the uncomfortable synaesthesia that Celan’s poetry invites that makes it so alluring to artists – to painters more particularly. Paintings’ dependency on hidden dialects that dismantle syntax, offers us the opportunity to see with more than our eyes.
The best art disrobes before us rather than covering up. Shed of garments, the fragile beauty and deprivations of immodesty ought to save us from our very worst instincts, but in Celan’s barren landscape there is little communion, infrequent redemption and only faint hope.
These works assemble quietly in a room on the other side of the world – more than a lifetime away from the stained soil of Europe. Why here and why now? “No reason – Nothing, No-one.”
Born a little ahead of Celan, Czech writer Franz Kafka’s family would suffer at the hands of the same malignancy.
Kafka said that “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us”. This is a harsh imperative and one I am certainly not up to. However I am grateful that artists with whom we are fortunate enough to work alongside, gently remind me and occasionally compel me to do just that.
FOX JENSEN McCRORY AUCKLAND
10 PUTIKI STREET
GREY LYNN, AKL 1021
TUE – BY APPOINTMENT
WED – FRI 11.00 to 5.00
SAT 11.00 – 3.00
TELEPHONE +649 360 9161