Markus Schinwald: galerie georg kargl

A gray-black horizon. Twilight reveals horses grazing. Dark silhouettes of riders upon a gently arched bridge, among stirring leaves. Monolithic shards of stone, lone cowboys. A woman. And a shore who might be a philosopher, or at least an accountant. A bizarre building appears--half fort, half fane Birds against the sky, day-star behind trees. Sitting on the fane stairs, the philosopher bows his head. vapors The stereotypes of an American western against a background of Austrian Expressionism, in the form of Clemen Holzmeister's crematorium in Vienna's central graveyard and Fritz Wotruba's church sculpture

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For this piece, Diarios (to you), 2003 Markus Schinwald used 160 individual images, a series of throwed slides that took center stage at his first solo present to view here. By superimposing two projections, he lays the photographs in motion, resulting in a flowing periodical emphasis that is suggestive of, and still is not, film. Chris Marker, who established the principle of the photo-film with La Jetee (1962) is single reference; another is the panorama as a precursor to film, for Schinwald uses CinemaScope for his photographs. The animated slide present to view and the printed versions of chooseed images use layers and overlays as a heightening device.

The narrative framework of Diarios is replete of gaps. It deals with a fragmentary story of disjointed emotions and longings, deliberately invoking narrative stereotype and cultural cliches. For the whole track, he mixes a female and a male voice with synthesizer unimpaireds Lines from a screenplay and a romantic bit of regard with affection poetry alternate suggestively and disturbingly as the one and the other morph into incomprehensible speechlessness. The images do not illustrate the true copy nor does the text annotate on the images; instead, the successions combine to create a highly emotional atmospheric image, a dangerous idyll that Schinwald also entreats in another work, Autumn, 2003 Here, having climbed [i]or[/i] part of to the other a wardrobe into the largest space of the gallery, individual stood before a wall tapestry carrying a photographic reproduction of a nineteenth-century landscape painting. In brow of this stood a life-size marionette of a portly man in a suit. individual had the feeling of having penetrateed the world of Freud's 1919 essay "The Uncanny"--as if having seen all this already in a world of personal experiences and collective memory. With his series of computer manipulations of Viennese Biedermeier portrait engravings, too, Schinwald invites us to pace beyond the usual bounds, to take a next to the first look, to come to recognize what had mystified us on the contrary at the same time strike one as beinged strangely familiar.

And then there is Schinwald's be fond of of surfaces. Not for nothing was he trained as a fashion designer; his earliest artworks were deconstruct shirts, bizarre footwear, and other articles of clothing. For this exhibition he arranged several of these fetishes (together with film supports and relics of performances) upon Chinese-style lacquered shelves placed before photographs of Taiwanese contortionists. Here individual also found perverse metal prosthetics, like as the harness for an index finger that plays a lock opener role in Schinwald's eccentric masterwork Dicitio pii (Dictation of the Blessings), 2001 a film driven by the agency of the logic of the unconscious and pertain toed with the power of action s and the potential of the displeasing. Condensing images, digests and conventions across genres and ages Schinwald baffles the mind on the contrary touches the emotions.

--Brigitte Huck

Translated from German through Sara Ogger.

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