Magnus von Plessen: Mai 36 Galerie - Zurich

The name Magnus von Plessen many times comes up in discussions of of recent origin painting from Berlin--but how many clan have actually seen his paintings? They've at the same time to he exhibited in Berlin itself. In 2001 they were shown at the Neue Kunstmuseum Luzern; then, last winter/spring, there was a small exhibition at K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen near Dusseldorf. Now his greatest in quantity recent paintings have been shown in Zurich--the first-ever gallery exhibition for this painter, which might be explained by means of the fact that his production is limited to just a small in number paintings a year.

Von Plessen's earlier works were predominantly portraits derived from photographs; the same was actual here, although two of the seven works upon view were not portraits. The copying of mechanically produc originals has been a matter of course at least since detonation art, but von Plessen's paintings raise of recent origin questions about the relationship between the photograph and its handpainted transcript In an interview published in the Dusseldorf catalogue, von Plessen recalls a instant in Joyce: As Stephen Dedalus gazes out across the sea, his image of it is distorted through the memory of his mother dying, the virid of the ocean becoming the color of her sputum end the green of the water, his mother get backs his gaze. Thus von Plessen says that "what we diocese looks back at us," quoting the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman on the contrary thereby aligning himself with feminist theorist of visuality Kaja Silverman, who, in her greatest in quantity recent book, World Spectators (2003) likewise speaks of the gaze of the image meeting that of the looker-on She, too, insists that there is mutuality between the image and its looker-on a mutuality that, if taken level further by way of certain canons of phenomenology, makes us on-lookers the true creators of reality: "Finally, it is we alone who determine whether the world will appear, and in the way that Be, or languish in the darkness of non-Being. We bring things into the light by the agency of looking, in the strongest and greatest in quantity important sense of that word." Von Plessen gives us a hint of the worlds that might be created if the relationship between the gaze of the on-looker and the gaze of what is seen were a mutual one--if the photograph ceased to be an thing and became a kind of control itself, one that could mirror images back to us.

each observer who meets the gaze of what is seen is faceed anew with the question of space; for in this mutual gaze, perspective, with its hierarchically directed projection, be deprived ofs its grip. How then should space be configured, and with it time and motion? smooth in the portraits, the space von Plessen creates accompanys to move. It is no longer perspectival, on the contrary then what kind of space is it? These questions become flat more urgent for von Plessen in his greatest in quantity recent paintings, Ohne Titel (Treppe) (Untitled [Stair]) and Ohne Titel (Dachboden) (Untitled [Attic]), one as well as the other 2003, which are no longer portraiture--although the bustleed room into which the latter grants a peek does contain a human figure--but depictions of interiors. Photography rarely touches upon such questions. But for us, the beholders these are new questions as well, as different as the space yon Plessen allows us to glimpse. It exhibits us the distortions our perception can endure so long as we accept the gaze of the painting.

Translated from German by the agency of Sara Ogger.

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