NERO MAGAZINE » Christoph Meier Greenpisellivideosculpture

Christoph Meier Greenpisellivideosculpture

June 22 – September 30, 2102

galleria collicaligreggi -Via Oliveto Scammacca, 2A, Catania

Christoph Meier stages a new project entitled greenpisellivideosculpture. The Austrian artist, like on previous occasions, presents a selection of works displayed in the past (in this case, at the prestigious Secession Hall in Vienna), combining them with a new series of coloured sculptures, testifying to his recent interest in the pictorial and graphic aspects of sculpture. The sculptures are painted heavy-handedly, their texture unrefined. A ‘crunchy’ kind of painting, as he himself defines it, yet one which highlights the sculptural quality of the objects by virtue of their very materiality. Here he uses a simple method, the same for all of them: the objects are bunched together and painted, so as to influence each other reciprocally.

Thus a deliberately precarious and humble process which still highlights a knowingly critical position, as well as a personal need to measure up to one’s own era, both from an aesthetic and an ethical point of view. Infact, in the face of an arid society and a knowledge which may be easily accessed at low cost via internet, Meier presents a direct and simple form of art, in which the artist’s identity is more akin to that of those who practise art as a hobby rather than those for whom it is a noble and costly undertaking, labouring under the pretence of being intelligent. Rather than sporting his technical or intellectual prowess, he prefers to hide it away and pretend not to be interested, aware that an attitude which is apparently more ‘superficial’ and ‘crunchy’ may in fact be more effective and communicative. This is a position which expresses an urgent and widespread feeling, calling for a greater presence of art in everyday life.At any rate, it must be said that all his works show traces of their own creative process. The work entitled George is a good example of this and serves to understand the aesthetic implications to be found in his work. The wood used in this work is taken from the chest in which he then sent his works to Catania. This box had been given to him by George, an artist friend . Meier used part of the wood from the chest as part of a spray painting on cardboard. But somehow the piece of wood used in the painting process was more meaningful than the finished painting itself, and so he came round to the decision to use it as a sculpture. This is an approach that derives from the series of works entitled Nicolas in which the legs of the sculpture were made of the sticks that the artist had used to mix his paints.This way of working highlights fundamental aspects of the creative process such as for example chance, the narrative component present in matter just as much as the performative component, underlined by the actions he carries out to transform the works and make them both self-referential (each of them embodies the basic principles of sculpture) and able to dialogue amongst themselves and with their context. A procedure which defines a scene, yet which inexorably eliminates the centrality of the artist, for whom it is almost as if he were renouncing paternity of the artwork, and which through the act of viewing is transferred to the onlooker, the unsuspecting performer within a perceptive device of great narrative potential.reen/piselli/video/sculpture stands for colour/matter/medium/art: the ironic synthesis of a very serious creative process which Meier invites us to reflect on.

Image above: Christoph Meier, Greenpisellivideosculpture, 2012, Installation view