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1/11/2007

Pip Culbert/Paul Saint

Gitte Weise Gallery, Berlin

Flag/Rules + suits

Pip Culbert - Flag
Pip Culbert's work transcends the borders between art and every-day-life. Discarded objects from our daily life, e.g. trousers, shirts, bags, and cushions find a new context and are literally given a new existence. Pip Culbert chooses objects we all recognize from our personal use challenging the way we see and think about them. On first look we encounter the fabric outlines of objects whose inner mass has been cut away leaving behind all but the seams and threads. Weightlessness pervades these works and we wish to hold them to discover their two-dimensional secret.

They simulate depth and volume yet remain virtual in character. What at first may appear abstract and timeless can somehow revert simultaneously to a metaphor for personal memory. The works mathematical rigor and economy of line is balanced by their materiality as it is with the presence of used objects or articles of pre-worn clothing. Pip Culbert's wall-drawings open a space between the aesthetic experience of vision and the associations these works invoke. Here the mantra (less is more) this apparently hackneyed circumscription for the concentration on essentials - is made accessible to the viewer in a surprisingly new and vivid way.

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Paul Saint - Rules + suits
Same Difference
The pots have become mirrors and the mirrors have become pots. They are each the other's fall guy in a conspiracy of forms. Inside and outside are now on the same side of the equation, because now there are no sides. And now there is nothing but sides. Space is simultaneously open and closed. (Warhol liked to think about space. He said, 'My favourite piece of sculpture is a solid wall with a hole in it to frame the space on the other side'.1) Things are inside and outside at the same time. Things seem the same yet different. Same difference.

Paul Saint's work is a Warholian philosophy turned inside out. Sculptures become reflective walls with objects in front of them to frame the space on both sides. The coupling of figures and grounds are threaded together through the rules of geometry, and then slowly sabotaged. The weave is loose and appearances are leaking. ('There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza'.) The threshold of equivalence bends with every sidelong glance. Each repetition brings discrepancy rather than symmetry. The world appears to perpetually expand under the strain of vision, moving beyond the realm of visual coherence. Only visual approximations remain within reality's fray. They are the second thoughts that idle in our line of sight, blind spots on a view to infinity.

The prints are more like charts. They are analogous, not interchangeable. They resemble readouts from a polygraph test, measuring the flow of perception in the rise and fall of suspicion and trust. The suits appear in this (geo)graphic locale. They invent and undo the sovereignty of space depending on how their hand has been dealt within the terrain.

It is the other rulers, however, that form a common ground of knowledge across Saint's work as a whole. They appear as the measure of the world and the world itself. On the surface, the rulers are root systems and celestial bodies, revealing the earth's sedimentary layers and vast horizons with empirical faith. Beyond the façade, when the rulers are suspended in space, they expose the fault lines that connect reality to it likeness. Rules and Suits are a set of plans designed to be misread. Deliberately embedding loopholes and flaws within the architecture of his work, Saint creates a logic of shaky foundations. The rules have been broken and the suits have been worn. And when things fail to fall apart, it's always better to fix them until they break. Sometimes it's better to feel useful rather than obsolete. Sometimes things are right when they are wrong. Right?

Gitte Weise Gallery
Tucholskystrasse 47 - Berlin

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