Visit to ADRIAN GHENIE at Galeria Plan B

“Juggler with Still Life

The figures in Adrian Ghenie’s recent cycle of paintings are time-travelers: time travels through them, affecting their constitution, their capacity to voice presence or narrate biographical continuity. The works portray quasi-protagonists – figures about to become grounds, grounds usurping the place of the figure by taking on a vaguely, convulsively anatomical form. Torsos are undone into spiraling flimsiness, skulls become baroque enclosures, limbs twist or twitch and eyeballs work like hinges in the rotations of an abstract, panoramic optics. Their universe is very much in motion, seemingly pivoting on body parts and sensory organs. The vitality of gestures and the torsion of postures in the paintings is not an occasion to compose movement as extension or purpose, as fragment from a destiny. Rather than propelled by an inner need, it seems to happen, catastrophically or at least begrudgingly, from the outside – as a force that is exterior to these brittle bodies, marionetted by their circumstances. Their appearance is laboriously discomposed, rendered as a swirling mass of expansions and contractions. Having received the stigmata – without source, ecstasy or recompense – of smudges and blurs, wounds through which they hemorrhage resolution, they toil at the borders of perceptual distinction, between a vanishing that is never reached, and a coherence that their depleted vitality cannot guarantee. In this atrophied time, nothing ever ends and nothing really begins.” (Text excerpt from the press release by courtesy of Mihnea Mircan & Galeria Plan B)

More information on the Galeria Plan B Website.