The white trash boys listen to their headphones
Blasting white noise in the convenience store parking lot
I hung around there wasting my time
Hoping you'll stop by...<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Modest Mouse - Sleepwalking (1999)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The paintings of Fritz Bornst\u00fcck invite us to take a solitary walk in a sleepy or locked-down city. The artist works on the notion\nof dorveille, a word inherited from French and dating from the 17th century to designate a state of drowsiness, half asleep or\nhalf awake. A practice located between two phases of sleep which has disappeared over time. (In English it was also called\n\u201cthe watch\u201d.) Dorveille promotes a state that is conducive to daydreaming, to meditation, and to existential and memorial\nintrospection. In this sense, the exhibition entitled Sleepwalking plunges us into a state of semi-consciousness, into an\nuncomfortable in-between: between wakefulness and sleep, between dog and wolf, between the city and the jungle. between\nthe exterior and the interior. The scenes painted by Fritz Bornst\u00fcck can be seen as the visual and sensory experiences\nof a sleepwalker, or of a person going through dorveille before going back to sleep. We thus walk in the company of an\ninvisible protagonist through the streets of Berlin, wastelands, construction sites and other third places or non-places of the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From precarious objects, scrap materials and waste, Fritz Bornst\u00fcck creates a portrait of a society where humans are absent.\nThey departed, leaving behind them the traces of their daily lives: a cigarette butt, a can, an Ikea chair, a radio, an apron,\nan alarm clock. Identifiable objects that the artist chooses with care. Their presence generates echoes and stimulates our\nmemories. Fritz Bornst\u00fcck works on the sensitive dimension of a collective memorial platform through which personal projections\ncan occur. So objects are the main protagonists of the paintings: a birthday candle planted in the bun of a burger, a computer\ntower, a metal bucket, a wooden jukebox, a watch. If the human figure is absent in its physical representation, the combinations\nof objects (whole and fragmented) form human portraits. The objects and animals personify humanity. We meet a rat who,\nnear a fire, is roasting a marshmallow. The artist also paints turnips with faces with threatening expressions. One of them is\nsmoking a cigarette. Fritz Bornst\u00fcck thus plays with the layers of reality by alternating science fiction, dreams and social realities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the atmosphere of a nocturnal squat, the artist creates \u201cjunk spaces\u201d where the artifacts of our past and present existences\nlie. Concrete meets vegetation, while animals populate the piles of garbage. It is in no way a dystopian still life because, as the\nartist points out: life is omnipresent. The artist specifies that \u201chuman absence gives space to non-human things and beings\u201d.\nFrom spiders to owls, tits, snails and hares, animal life unfolds across the paintings. Likewise, trees and saxifrages co-evolve\nwith human ruins to form a recurring landscape. A living perspective that the artist also manifests through his way of painting:\nquickly, leaving traces of his different passages on the canvas, brutal passages which form layers, roughness and textures.\n\u201cMy painting is not flat, it is not an image without thickness.\u201d Although he paints quickly, Fritz Bornst\u00fcck speaks of a long\nperiod of fermentation during which he returns to his work several times. The density of gestures and representation generates\ncontrary movements, a vibration and a form of toxicity in line with the post-human universe that he strives to depict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Julie Crenn is an art critic (AICA) and independent curator. Since 2018, she has curated the program at Transpalette - Centre d'art contemporain de Bourges and is artistic advisor for the Atelier A - Arte Creative program.<\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":21142,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-21139","exposition","type-exposition","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-passees"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exposition\/21139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exposition"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exposition"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}