4|
WERNERTHÖNIFOURBARFO
W E R N E R T H Ö N I 4|4
WTA editions
004
Barcelona, 2019
Texto: Peter Freund
Imagenes: Erich Meier
Maquetación: WTA editions
Imprenta: Onlineprinters GmbH
Werner Thöni’s 4|4
The driving aesthetic of Werner Thöni’s new work, 4|4 (“4 bar 4”), inverts the
celebrated dictum of fellow Swiss artist Paul Klee, “Art does not reproduce the
visible; it makes visible.” Klee’s modernism champions the revelatory power of
visual art. Thöni by contrast cuts an expressive path that unifies visible reproduction with its apparent opposite, material concealment.
Four 130-centimeter by 130-centimeter Prussian blue paintings stand directly opposite four prepared, cube-shaped benches upholstered with canvas, also
painted Prussian blue. The four painting/bench pairings are marked with a small
set of numbers and affixed with sales-like tags which link the wall canvases to
their corresponding seats and each pair to the others through a logic of series.
The serial logic is sewn through this body of work as a concatenation of integers scattered in a specific pattern across these painted surfaces: 13-16, 26-29,
43-46, and 68-71. Identically positioned in each painting/bench coupling, the
four number clusters enter into a larger implied sequence – running from 0 to 71
(perhaps beyond) – in which the spaces between the four pieces convey ellipses
of missing numbers.
The composition of each painting presents a fundamentally identical geometry
that suggests the convention of a three-view plan for building and assembly
instructions. Do the paintings hint at plans for the assembly of the benches? Within the repeating geometry, the detailed markings vary, like the numbers and
tags, from piece to piece. At first, the sketched views register as figures against
a deep blue background; however, closer inspection reveals that these figures
are in fact the background over which the blue has been superimposed as mask.
Werner Thöni does not object to explanations of his densely conceived canvases but is quietly indifferent to volunteering any. Is it to give the viewer a
greater role in the work? After all, by coupling the paintings with seats, he
materially integrates into the work an invitation to the viewer to sit and have a
look. Introversion may be the birthright of every artist, but Thöni’s is engaged
with a broader problematic animating his project.
4|4 was inspired by a tragic event from 2015 that received widespread international attention. The work pays tribute to 71 migrants and refugees from Iraq,
Syria, and Afghanistan who died while locked inside a truck traveling on an
Austrian motorway towards Germany. This final cause of Thöni’s project remains decidedly absent from the visible surface of the work. Beyond the number
sequence, which correlates with the tragic death count, Thöni has otherwise
created the work out of an intricate network of contingent, even incidental associations he developed while contemplating the tragedy over time.
The project springs from an impulse that is neither directly empathic nor edifying. Instead it opens up a context for the artist to generate free associations
that redirect and refract the public light shone on the tragedy. The associative
elements – including the grid and cube (building blocks of design); title labels
cited from a 2017 MoCA exhibition, “Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano
L.A.” (statements of desire); IKEA patterns (the hope of a prefabricated life);
and Prussian blue (a pigment produced by oxidation, exposure to oxygen) – are
transmuted by the artistic process. Some are entirely covered over with the Prussian blue, leaving only hints of an underlying grid, the ragged suggestion of a
cube, markings, scribbles, and indeterminate sketches of happenstance objects.
And yet all these contingent details are framed within the precise, repeating
visual structure and beautiful imposing blue.
Contemporary art has long endeavored to burst the unbudgeable nexus between
revelation and visibility – between truth and the evidential. The seriality, maskings, and geometries position 4|4 within a particular lineage: Sol Lewitt’s incomplete cubes, the subtractive aesthetics of Gordon Matta Clark and Doris Salcedo, the impenetrable surfacing and memorialist markings of Antoni Tàpies.
The work’s installation aspect brings the viewer into the realm of Duchamp’s
“reciprocal ready-made,” where by “using a Rembrandt as an ironing board,” an
artwork is returned problematically to the status of everyday object. The viewer
of 4|4 must confront the awkward prospect of physically trespassing on the art
when deciding whether to take a seat. What might this mean that I sit down on
the very object depicted in the abstract plan on the wall in front of me?
The root of Werner Thöni’s current work presents an ethical withdrawal. From
the quotidian to the political, the contemporary fetish of transparency expresses
the hopeless utopianism of an administrative discourse. When communication
is assessed according to its clarity – based in evidence and explanation as an ingratiating form of intellectual friendliness – any excesses of ornament, allusion,
or indirection appear as hostile obfuscation. The proliferation of documentary
exposés that showcase the world’s tremendous suffering through lavish photographic and testimonial evidence begins to overlap with the endless advertised
promises of commodities and markets to remedy the woes of the day. The unmistakable clarity of message risks obscuring the stakes of enjoyment for those
who survive even from a well-informed distance.
As equitable as its claims may be, the current ethic of transparency belies the
bad faith of every self-righteous complaint against obscurantism. Painting has
always been about covering up, hiding, or obscuring the last daub of paint, a
flawed rendering, the void of the canvas. Werner Thöni’s paintings take obscurantism into their artistic embrace and propose a form of tribute that withdraws
from a tragic event into the precise space of its absence. The artist makes no
claim to have a relation to the reported victims but rather stipulates personal
associations out of the very lack of relationship. Instead of particularizing the
universally-demonstrable tragedy, the essential gesture of 4|4 is to universalize
the always yet-to-be-distinguished particularity of such loss. In other words, to
face a public tragedy truly one must confront one’s own radical distance from
the event. The artist’s quiet indifference to volunteering explanations in this
case represents neither a coyness nor a refusal but rather an aesthetic that seeks
the basis for authentic expression.
Peter Freund, PhD
Artist/Professor, Department of Art & Art History, Saint Mary’s College of California
Barcelona, 2019
4|4
F o u r p a i n t i n g s, f o u r b e n c h e s
Pintura
I want a poodle
130x130x3 cm
Azul de Prussia Ftalo
Puff
I want to be seen together
37x37x41 cm
Azul de Prussia Ftalo
Pintura
I want to be easy
130x130x3 cm
Azul de Prussia Ftalo
Puff
I want us to sneak out
37x37x41 cm
Azul de Prussia Ftalo
Pintura
I want pain
130x130x3 cm
Azul de Prussia Ftalo
Puff
I want a six footer
37x37x41 cm
Azul de Prussia Ftalo
Pintura
I want a baritone
130x130x3 cm
Azul de Prussia Ftalo
Puff
I want Arnold
37x37x41 cm
Azul de Prussia Ftalo
Render
4|4
Magnif ied views
I want a poodle
I want to be easy
I want pain
I want a baritone
I want to be seen together
I want us to sneak out
I want a six footer
I want Arnold
Special Thanks
Núria Eres Charles
Peter Freund
Bruno Ryff
Nicolas Freytag
Adela Moreno Montaño
Néstor Espinach
Agnès Thöni
The artist can be reached at art@wernerthoeni.com.
For more information about his work,
visit www.wernerthoeni.com.