Lukas Quietzsch at Ramiken – Artforum International
Warning is the care we take to keep away from the worst fates. Stand on the finish of any subway platform and behold: two yellow traces stretch out into the space, demarcating the sides between security and sure demise. Warnings with out language are visible manifestations of the hazard itself, such because the inexplicable shadow that presaged Father Brennan’s demise in The Omen (1976), or the images of Alaska’s vanishing McCall Glacier on the Environmental Safety Company’s Local weather Change Indicators web site. Lukas Quietzsch’s first exhibition in New York, aptly titled “Parallel Warnings in Easy Preparations,” advises us to proceed with warning and take every thing as an indication.
The seven work on this present have been produced over the previous two years by the artist in his Berlin dwelling studio. The surfaces are primed in a swirling sample with a chalky combination. Subsequent, colours are utilized with skinny layers of gouache after which repeatedly washed out, producing an ethereal, undulated-staining impact. Delicate seams are sewn into the canvases, imposing a near-invisible structure inside the chromatic psychedelia that’s extra felt than seen. Quietzsch’s sutures are the closest factor to a straight line in a lot of the compositions, but they nonetheless wobble off (or again on?) course, calling essentially the most consideration to themselves at four-way intersections: A refined reminder to look each methods earlier than crossing the gallery.
Geometric doppelgängers dubiously seem inside each work within the present, pushing the viewer to attract connections throughout bodily house. The portray on Ramiken’s east wall, Die nicht integrierten Persönlichkeitsanteile meiner Eltern (diesen meine Ängste hinzugefügt und die Gedankengänge angepasst) (The Not Built-in Character Traits of My Mother and father [My Fears Added to Them and the Thought Processes Adapted]), 2021, gives a number of exit methods for the faint of coronary heart. You’ll be able to both comply with the ladder of cubicles straight up and off the canvas’s prime edge and name it heaven; or descend the staircase of seams, deep into the image’s rusty ether.
Determine and floor interactions flip invariably inside these multiperspectival tableaux, unleashing a deluge of associative potentialities, as cloud gazing or studying tea leaves do. It’s pure to be skeptical of that which is overtly suggestive but defiantly obscure—just like the sympathetic magic of a curbside psychic, “Jesus toast,” or most summary work—however Quietzsch earns our belief by offering pathways to navigate the quickly shifting temporalities and situations of his imagined worlds, and maybe our personal. It’s all concerning the journey, man.
— Julia Ribeiro
