A PIECE OF SPACE, MATERIAL AND FORM.
Space, material and form exist as part of the artwork before the actual work is added, writes Jonas Feferle in the foyer to A PIECE OF SPACE, MATERIAL AND FORM. There is a behind and an in front in the here and now of the moment. The subject before articulation, the subject that doesn’t speak, is unattainable for the subject of the assertion. Unless it dies. As if it takes a surface, topsoil, to put someone underground. Sending them west, we say. A corner is the spatial consequence of precise incisions in a material the shape of which forms a surface. One cut represents the edge for another. Numerous brushed and burnished incisions convey the impression of texture, establishing a regime that does not really exist. An outside within the frame. We say: the unconscious mind.
The unconscious is part of the psychological apparatus. Spatiality may be the projection of the psychic apparatus, noted Sigmund Freud in August 1938, in London. There is an image. And there I am. We say self when we mean the linear succession of thoughts. We say not-self when the law of simultaneity gains the upper hand. This makes no difference to the subject. It recurs as it knows no outside without itself. Space, material and form are there before the artwork. As you are. For the moment. An instant is possible where the eye encounters a material whose shape may suggest an answer. Space is part of this answer. We say: Phantasm. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Jonas Feferle works in the series RAUMTEILE with incisions in sheets of aluminium, the position and shape of which are not independent of the space in which they hang. Aluminium is a soft, a pliable material. Which is to say, exacting: unforgiving. Like the reproduction of bodies and words. Variety knows simultaneity and sequence. Several cuts form volumes, bodies, whose repetition in the space loosely structures it. The space consists in the simultaneity of these cuts in relation to one another and in relation to something that is missing, because it has been removed. “Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it”, wrote Freud. In exile.
Text: Roman Widholm
Translation: Jonathan Quinn