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29/4/2015

Philipp Furhofer

Galerie Judin, Berlin

The arrest­ing art works in Philipp Fürhofer’s first exhi­bi­tion for Galerie Judin: In Light of the Hid­den, are multi-lay­ered and entranc­ing. Like the sub­ject mat­ter they depict, Fürhofer’s cre­ations are between two modes of being: they func­tion as light boxes and as paint­ings. Depend­ing on whether the light is turned on or off, the con­tents are illu­minated or shrouded. In the pie­ces where the light rhythmically switches via a timer, we have to con­cen­trate in order to absorb the informa­tion relayed in these alternat­ing states. This game interferes with the more straightforward act of looking that we might employ when perus­ing a tra­di­tional paint­ing. It casts us in an active role, one that encour­ages us to move around and adopt differ­ent posi­tions of engage­ment.

If Fürhofer’s work is about the sus­pen­sion between two states, then the phrase: ’between two worlds’ could have been coined for the artist him­self. Torn between pursu­ing a career as an artist and as a pianist, Fürhofer decided on art, though music, and most notably opera, are still extremely important in his life and influ­en­tial for his art practice. It was through his work for the stage, cre­at­ing sets for some of the world’s great­est opera houses, that Fürhofer learnt how to cap­ti­vate an audi­ence, and it is Fürhofer’s aware­ness of the role of the viewer that puts him in such a unique posi­tion as an artist. Not only do we need to be active, rather than pas­sive, when con­sid­er­ing his practice, the spy-foil surfaces of Fürhofer’s works throw back our own reflec­tion when the light is off, and ban­ish us to invis­i­bil­ity when the light comes on. This forces us to look beyond our own image and into the inte­r­ior of what the work con­tains. This is appar­ent when we con­sider What We Call Real­ity. With the light on, we find a throng of lively fig­ures runn­ing and jump­ing, whereas with the light off, we find instead our own reflec­tion amongst a tan­gle of wires, a vis­cous, bloody streak, and, where the fig­ures were, smears of bleached-out, fleshy pink paint.

Besides evoking the transitori­ness of life, What We Call Real­ity turns our thoughts to the cor­po­real. Fürhofer was inspired to cre­ate his multi-lay­ered objects, with their neon lights, bulbs, rub­ber tubes and blend of organic and inorganic mat­ter, after looking at x-rays of his own chest when he was lying in a Berlin hos­pital. The sense of dis­loca­tion between peer­ing at an image of one’s own insides, while simulta­ne­ously pre­sent­ing an integrated, appar­ently her­met­ically sealed phys­ical ves­sel to the out­side world, proved an unn­erv­ing, but inspir­ing para­dox.
Tristan’s Body, a ref­er­ence to Wag­ner’s opera ’Tristan und Isolde’, is unlit. The focus of this work is paint­ing and its strange marriage to pie­ces of scrunched up plas­tic and other frag­ments of con­tem­po­rary detri­tus. We see the out­line of Tristan’s body, awash with rain and sea foam, and merg­ing with this, a se­ries of sails and ropes that allude to the set for the pre­lude of Act One, on the deck of Tristan’s ship dur­ing the cross­ing from Ire­land to Cornwall.

The power of nature, and par­tic­u­larly the sea, is a con­stant through­out the exhi­bi­tion, a metaphor for the uncon­trollable forces and relent­less rhythms that shape our lives and loves. Fürhofer’s deci­sion to turn to ’Tristan und Isolde’, one of the pinnacles of the oper­atic repertoire, as inspi­ra­tion for a number of works for this show, leads us to ques­tion what he is commu­nicat­ing to us. We know that for the pro­tag­o­nists of this tragic story, night must not give way to day, for not only will this mean phys­ical sep­a­ra­tion for the two lovers, it will also lead them to con­clude that the only recourse open to them is to die, rather than be sep­a­rated. Para­doxi­cally, it is through dying that they pre­serve their love and its story for ever, and in so doing, out­wit death. In his essay, ’Is Wag­ner Bad For Us’, Nicholas Spice com­ments: ’The sec­ond act of Tristan und Isolde is Romanticism’s great­est hymn to the night, not for the elfin charm and ethe­real chiaroscuro of moonbeams and starlight ... but night as a close bosom-friend of obliv­ion, a sim­u­lacrum of eter­nity, and a place to play dead … a zone beyond time’.

The notion of cre­at­ing a sim­u­lacrum of eter­nity, albeit a fleet­ing glimpse, is a leitmo­tif that per­vades Fürhofer’s works. Seduc­tion divides into four parts, each of which is illu­minated on a timer. As a whole, it resem­bles a fath­om­less under-water world with tumbling light bulbs – actual and painted – and cut-outs of androg­y­nous, face­less fig­ures. An inver­sion of what Guy Debord described as ’The Soci­ety of the Spectacle’ (where ’all that once was directly lived has become mere rep­re­senta­tion.’), instead of add­ing another layer to our con­sumerist cake and inau­thentic engage­ment with surface and soci­ety, it shocks us into a vis­ceral reac­tion, pro­voking us with the unexpected: wires wrig­gle like jelly fish tentacles, and the depth of the abyss is impos­si­ble to gage. It is spectac­u­lar and, as its title sug­gests, thrilling as well as dis­turb­ing.

There is a strongly spir­i­tual qual­ity to Fürhofer’s tactile cre­ations. Their evoca­tive nature prompts us to slip between tem­po­ral and spir­i­tual planes and reach for a higher order inspired by beauty, art and music. The diptych Paying Homage has a grandeur that is born of its connec­tion to an opu­lent stage set. With pink spy foil on the left, and blue on the right, framed by bil­low­ing sails, there in the centre, cross­ing the divide, is a Gargantuan, ghostly fig­ure, stud­ded with wires or tentacles, and glis­ten­ing light bulbs. We could interpret this source of energy as a God-like fig­ure, or the per­son­i­fica­tion of a life-giv­ing force, but its strangely obs­cure form also hints at the under­world, sug­gest­ing that while it might give life, it could also take it.

At the core of Fürhofer’s practice is a deep aware­ness of the fragility of human exis­tence and the interface between the spark of life and the shad­ow­land that waits in the wings. There is a strange poetry inher­ent in the every­day that mourns our inevitable demise. It is there even in the detri­tus that spills over into our lives, and Fürhofer is adept at cap­tur­ing this. Kiosk resem­bles a phone booth. Bot­tles, billboards and pack­ag­ing flash up for a mat­ter of sec­onds only to dis­ap­pear and be replaced by the reflec­tive spy foil that reveals shad­owy fig­ures, wires and drips of paint.
As its title sug­gests, Bend­ing Light reveals complex prisms and kalei­do­scopic spaces forged from mirrors and flu­o­res­cent tubes. It conveys an eerie sense of sus­pen­sion in a place not attached to the phys­ical, and again we return to the sim­u­lacrum of the eternal. In con­trast, Becom­ing Mat­ter with its under­wa­ter, blue-lit bubbles and the out­line of life-giv­ing hands, sug­gests the be­gin­ning of time, of man, of every­thing, and a return to the sea in an end­less cycle.

Jane Neal

Image: invitation

Opening: 30 April 2015

Galerie Judin
Potsdamer Strasse 83
Berlin

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