13/9/2014
Markus Saile
Reception, Berlin
Magere Zeiten. Developed out from a complex search, fresh thin reservoirs of color-inhabited turpentine are shown. Installation vantage points are expressed in the selection of works for each wall or other architectural component.
To speak with Markus Saile is to look into the mind’s eye of
a chemist, stonemason, rocket scientist, cinematographer,
editor, wine maker, marksman, balloonist, engineer and
chef all in one. A cull of “thinly painted” images is pre-
sented during exhibition at RECEPTION. Developed out from
a complex search, fresh thin reservoirs of color-inhabited
turpentine are shown. Saile’s “lean application” concept has
been broadened over the last year, reaching new combina-
tions that result in a community of images able to inhabit
light, color and time.
Saile states “The paintings are between the picture as a ‘win-
dow’ in the classical sense of representation and the picture
as a diagram with its pictorial problems.”
This space in-between (classical window and picture as dia-
gram) is also a place of wanting, of hunger for an unknown
solution.
Installation vantage points are expressed in the selection of
works for each wall or other architectural component. The
architecture provides the “full wrapper” Saile wishes to
achieve. The arrangements guide the viewer into a “key” lo-
cation, fostering the feeling of locking, holding, and balance
something achieved in masonry key stoning. A keystone,
last stone up, cements place. Here Saile, toying with equal
distribution of painted and action keeps it essential
In other conditions of installation, he has summarized that
pairings have been made in order to embrace and reflect
time. In some cases, it is to enhance and direct the time du-
ration (sustained motion in one work), in other parings it is
to enhance the reflective illumination possibilities. Markus
notes – “Paintings can be arranged and rearranged in differ-
ent spatial constellations, communicating with each other”.
When they reach a kind of optical vertical plateau, a new
kind of experience is seen.
“When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience.
We feel our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.” (Jasper
Johns, artist)
Saile remains indebted to architecture. It is part of an overall
conviction that production can reflect world challenges such
as ecology and sustainability. One quality of architecture is
to play with light and with issue of translucency. In these
works transluscence is essential, and already in the painting.
Wheel sand paper at different depths carves out formations
for light, and can lead to the rescue of translucence lost dur-
ing the heavy pours of turpentine, scraping, and color im-
pregnation. Where light gets absorbed like a black hole is a
real challenge. For “natural” light, artificial light or “rescued
or reflected light”... each painting poses new questions, new
experimentations with technique.
Durational aesthetics engage the concept of how long it
takes to get to another place through art. In Magere Zeiten,
traveling backwards in time we can see back to the begin-
nings of the work, not unlike the Hubble telescope finds
for us earlier light/time. Viewers can recognize duration in
the short/small moments as well as the long/large, carrying
painting back and forth through time. The markers of time
have taken up residence in the materials he uses, and, how
they are deployed.
Geographies of duration are spaces created by the swiftness
of the human gaze, its ability to cruise through the paint,
to pronounce to find ebb and flow of materials, dissolving
spaces and fields of multi-layered thickness with their own
internal geographies. Saile seeks the internal renewal of
painted spaces, moving the form into the visual future.
He starts with an idea then lands somewhere later, some-
where in the light, bringing the viewer along.
The painting process involves multi-crafting flooded areas
with turpentine and ground color. The surfaces’ underlying
character insistently moves up, floats along the edge, and
like a balloonist, rises, releasing the full view of its form in
space. The meniscus shapes, small canopies, small celluloid
floaters, work to give an impression of light fields. Here,
illusionary penetrating spaces are a desired result. The hard
won repeated turpentine flood planes build a surface, but
it’s chemical burn material.
Consolidated strikes of color turpentine to the surface’s
shadow glows across a surface. It’s a time based, visible
push of color against hardness, then a complex task of ex-
posing paint. This durational affinity reminds of gelatinous, celluloid, filmstrip, hand colored film cells of the 1960’s or
1970’s underground art scene, sequential images made under
a hot projector beam. Yet here, the viewing is uninterrupted
by the shutter of a film projector, stopping the flow. Here, in
this “Magere Zeiten” zone the light bounces out back from
the MDF and into the eye / of the viewer. The painting shows
us where Saile was, and not a reproduction of that experi-
ence. It’s an affable artifact.
“The paintings are like a ‘window’ to confront a world you
are already aware that you are not walking inside of. You still
have the distance.” And what do we make of the distance in
this world anyway? As soon as Saile recognizes his system,
he moves away again ... to let the painting know itself.
text by Julia Scher, September 2014
Julia Scher is an American artist, born in Hollywood/Cali-
fornia. In the last 20 years, her research has explored social
control dynamics in the public sphere. She is a professor for
multimedia and performance at Cologne’s Kunsthochschule
für Medien.
Image: Untitled, 2014, oil on wood, 39 x 33 cm
Opening Sunday, September 14, 6 – 9 pm
Reception
Kurfürstenstraße 5/5a - 10785 Berlin
Markus Saile’s show can be seen by appointment
and at our special opening hours during abc weekend:
Friday Sept. 19 –Sunday Sept. 21, 2014, 12 am –6 pm