Group exhibition at Hoast with works by Lukas Matuschek m Marie Reichel, Wolfgang Matuschek.

And the Patterns of Oil
With works by Lukas Matuschek m Marie Reichel, Wolfgang Matuschek
18 December, 2021  - 9 January, 2022
Hoast, Vienna

A small room, three artistic positions, three different medias. Against the background of completely different processes and modes of working the artworks challenge the viewer to explore their simila-rities as well as their contrasts. In terms of both motif and formal language parallels can be drawn between the sculptures, drawings, and paintings, unfolding like a fine, amorphous web rather than following a central theme.
All three positions are based to a certain degree on the principle of appropriation—in the contempo-rary maelstrom of images, this seems almost impossible to avoid, since art is influenced by its sur-roundings to the same extent that it gives expression to them. The references may be of a pop-cultural or even old-masterly nature, but motifs rarely remain clearly legible. They are constantly being developed further—going beyond the simple interlocking of quotations of the postmodern era—and often oscillate between multiple levels of meaning. In the process, each viewer naturally generates their own associations; my imagination starts racing towards the movies:
In the glory of catastrophe, Kirsten Dunst as Justine in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia basks under the nocturnal moonlight in the knowledge of an onrushing, destructive planet. The white ball recurs throughout the untitled graphite drawings, not least in their format itself, providing clear, cool light. As a moon as well as a modernist lamp, it wafts through the precisely drawn pictorial worlds, which are sometimes inanimate, sometimes inhabited by an creature-like figure whose comic-like quality lends a Loriot-like twist to the sublime geometric bathroom backdrop.
The motif of the sphere, the ball, is also the point of reference for Shackle Balls, but the graphic delicacy is replaced by the plastic shaping process, which is concluded by a similarly meticulous polishing process with the help of a teaspoon. The sculptures look like dented bowling balls or old sports balls, with a morbid moment added by their hanging from ropes, reinterpreting their cartoo-nesque initial form of ball and chain into personification. Some-times they are enthroned high up under the ceiling or positioned on the floor, like a bird in a nest.
The fact that the almost abstract painterly works are also based on motifs from photographs may come as much as a surprise as the sophisticated working process that precedes completed paintings such as i*0273 (Future Garden I). They are random, often blurred digital photographs that capture social moments and are transferred to canvas using commercial inkjet prints and paste in which the color takes on a life of its own. Like fleeting memories, the motifs inscribe themselves in the paste layer—they remain legible only for the artist.
In doing so, they perform the reverse process of the Shackle Balls, whose smoothly polished surface negates alltraces of the manufacturing process. Only the artist’s handprints remain as a personal inscription and—as dents and bulges—testify not only to wear and tear, but evoke new, anthropo-morphic forms. In the estrangement of the digital images, such associations become blurred. The eye is confronted with an uncertainty that is reflected in the drawn untitleds in some fragile, almost surrealistic places, despite their strictly composed scenes.
In addition to their similarly shaped view of their environment, the three artists have in com- mon the precision of their craftsmanship, expressed both in the specific surface treatments that inspired the exhibition’s title and in clear forms––embedded in a digital world of images from which they draw just as much as from analog experience. This would sound corny, were it not for delicate refractions: hints of irony and a certain laconic lightness in dealing with those omnipresent images.

Text: Kathrin Heinrich