Clemens Frischenschlager | Figuration and the Paintings of Clemens Frischenschlager. A review by Alan Lockwood.

Immersed in Emergence: Figuration and the Paintings of Clemens Frischenschlager

by Alan Lockwood

The human figure strikes any number of poses, from summits and stages, pedestals and line-ups, gesticulating in observance of or as observed in the world, the figure’s elemental domain.

Such portrayals—snapshots inflating specifics of the subject like a granite gaze or an elegant relevé—strike a peculiar chord, restricting the figure from physical space, erasing temporal range. Making almost no impression on its vast environs, the figure (we'll leave "the body" to arts other than painting) is most itself in transition, the progressive variety of relations to what's fundamental, that being change in space.

Go figger: at close range, the human figure as vehicle, traversing what it can only discern as an emotional terrain. Being human is equal parts the vehicle and the trip, or progress. Or this partial equivalency of transporter and transported gives a norm from which all distinct instances realize an utter latitude of effect, while retaining that definitive pairing.

In Clemens Frischenschlager’s Evolution Paintings, the human figure sorties on and off abstraction—it would be equally valid to write "to and from recognize/ability." Certain canvases are dense and incandescently wrought; on others the trace hovers in keen, limpid suspension. Frischenschlager renders the wildly varied relations of his figures to their ground with enormous, almost clinical sympathy.

Wildly varied…though discernible figures occur over the course of the series, the artist uses his source material as underpinning rather than manifestation. Frischenschlager’s figurative sensibility individuates inside the work, verging frequently into unbounded abstraction.

In several instances (a diptych counterposing flayed figures; a broad canvas on which three masses inhabit a sky-washed, facetted ground as sumptuous as it is turgid) that which could be company could also be reappearance—or multiplication. Figures and their traces are left to themselves: not cartooned into characters, they are somehow both elevated and elemental, belonging to rather than involved by their sentience. The question of emergence is at least as much a function of ground, as the "they" recurring in this series can be either the implanted figure, or the entire canvas: the inclusion of the personal with the objective.

Painting with this dual recognize/ability (the figurative/abstract gamble; an attention option between the subject presented, or the entire canvas), the artist finds a churning, clotted, darkened mass in a number of these works. A cherry pit or something indigestible, this paint tangle is equally liable to appear as the heart of a structure or faintly enmeshed in impassioned remnants. Sometimes strewn with bold color like shredded Himalayan prayer flags, its indication anchors Frischenschlager’s work, and the exploration that occurs over these canvases—tactile acrylics with an affinity for lavenders and signal reds, sometimes flecked and sometimes staunched in aching blues—and gives a spectrum of results. The point is precisely this variety of stages, with one painting augmenting the surprise of another, which displays in turn its own varied phase or result.

A figure resides in one painting, caked in swathes of caulk and what looks like make-up base paint. Especially evident at head and shoulders, it is the figure’s suggestion or hiding that remains, with the telltale low core of bruised blue down around the spleen. The stone throes of Michelangelo’s Captives (an ecstasy of liberation? mineral torment?) are a famous allusion.

(Another might be the suspected saboteur in Ismail Kadare’s novel The Three Arched Bridge. Walled into a pier of the troublesome span, his plastered head protrudes from a swell in its stone foot—not a pretty sight, and what’s more the completed bridge will link the might of the imperial Ottomans to the factionalized Balkans, and to European prey beyond.)

Another large canvas teems with this disparate quality of dis/appearance. Its background, phenomenally red and cut in to a stylized geometry, throws a powerful ground (searing brimstone? richest wine?) up behind an unraveling figure in the pinnacle pose of a vaulter, or someone who has just lost it in a blow job or a knife fight. Though the figure itself is intensified to an extreme degree, its surface, the containment of volume, is being splintered as if its very molecules were accelerating in a mescaline haze. Or a supreme relaxation, allowing relocation within the entirety of space. The lurid crimson is both an amazing harangue, and an internal verity.

These more figurative Evolution Paintings, with their bold, contentious content, are given the lie at the series’ far end, with Frischenschlager’s signatory abstractions. Attenuated, meticulous, the sparest of these paintings float a torque-like turbine that revolves on a blanched background. A few assertive, dripping strokes suffice as a rarified content; Frischenschlager combs one or two passages, provoking contrast, heightening the refined intensity. Their ground, finished with an allied economy of purpose, is as subtle as it is evocative: the peripheries of Joan Mitchell’s monumental La Vie En Rose are called to mind, as is the washed, sky-like resonance of late De Kooning.

The Evolution series reaches a certain ineffable apex with these paintings, extending the range of states that liberate the viewer into an emotional experience of color. Over such a gamut, the figure is in effect absolved into the drama of feeling. Frischenschlager exercises a nimble concentration, working with potential over the Evolution series, allowing the approach itself to be the work, rather than consigning the work to expressing a facet of process, an achievement. Without divorcing feeling from representation (as color field painting can drill into the phenomenology of emotion), he also escapes the restriction of emotion required by the allegorical subject.

Where Balthus’s blatant figuration (equal parts devotion and provocation) recurs in our time in lush psychodramas by John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, Frischenschlager’s work is closer to that of Cicely Brown, who wrests abstraction from convoluted representational puzzles. Brown, however, relies on a figurative structure: nude orgies oozing into De Kooning homages (his booze-fueled phase of the mid-1970s), and the verdant deluges of her current landscapes.

To abandon painting for a moment and gain a more experiential reference to the Evolution series’ effect, the video artist Gary Hill’s shadow-enclosed installation Tall Ships provides a possible parallel. Presented at the Whitney some years ago, Hill’s piece required the viewer to pass through a black velvet drape opening into what looked at first to be pitch darkness. No small number of Biennale guests turned back at that point.

Once inside, a visitor could not immediately recognize the full capacity of the space, for sight takes time to adjust in embracing darkness. Gradually, projected figures would hove in to view, interspersed along the walls, approaching and retreating, beckoning to (or ignoring) the patient observer. What began to occur then was perhaps even more evocative: one became aware of who else may’ve braved the large chamber’s grudging obscurity, this awareness oftentimes triggered when breathed on or bumped into by someone else present but not yet seen.

Another overlay occurred, if one gave Tall Ships enough time and one’s sight adjusted sufficiently to notice hesitant visitors appear through the entrance drape. A striking sympathy was generated towards those entering, an internal or experiential sympathy that explained that they were obviously not seeing. Or were not seeing yet. They might (or might not) allow themselves to grow to see, then to see that they were being seen, then again to see that others who followed weren’t seeing. Darkness, one was reminded, is feeling.

With the Evolution Paintings, feeling is a veil dance, as Frischenschlager operates the generous, mysterious opportunity of the canvas, opting for it over the void, while treating it to strikingly similar parameters.

+++

In a series that Frischenschlager terms his graffiti-inspired works, the artist paints impulsive constructions, organic structures mating will with chance. Their aggressive development is buttressed in a bastion of words and language fragments. One canvas with a caustic, mask-like imposition in rough blues and browns places the words ON/OFF/NO/HELP in separate quadrants around the central construction. Another, an erupting or shard-like fan of blue, white, orange and red over hints of a cardboard ground, has the sentence "You should learn how to say no." "Home To The Universe" reads a hot orange/red painting, bending like a wind-blown blaze.

One big canvas, brawny, rudely colored, has all the outward markings of graffiti—an onslaught scrapping for notice in a rife milieu where attention is harried by ceaseless convulsions of construction/destruction, the sole guarantee being that this, too, will disappear (at street level, graffiti has a notoriously short shelf life). This large, largely blue, tumbling canvas bears the phrase "It’s not about what you do," scrawled low and right of center.

Frischenschlager’s work merits attention and contemplation, not the perils of urban wrack ‘n ruin. Though tides battle across this painting, hints and gleans give way to its underlying structure. Indications of Hans Hofmann strengthen the painting’s lower realm or chasis: the rambunctious color-world of Jardin d’Amour or Fiat Lux, and Hofmann’s pull/push of expressionistic brushwork among delineated geometric locations in works like Smaragd and Te Deum.

In Frischenschlager’s painting, this union of impulse and structure is an overlay, rather than Hoffman’s juxtaposition. Not much of the geometrics survive, though their suggestion give body to the swamped mid-ground of rash color work.

(Hoffman had synthesized Kandinsky’s expressionistic energy to Malevich’s abstract ultimatums, but it’s as joyous agglomerations of color that his work endures, not that uneasy alliance of contradictory radical impulses.)

Also evident in Frischenschlager’s paintings is Franz Klein’s telescoped, incisive gesture, with that gesture highlighted in a string of five small paintings. Taken individually, these pieces are exercises, while when taken together they display a working component of Frischenschlager’s method, as apparent in the bruised cynosure that recurs throughout the Evolution series as it is in the Graffiti paintings’ more raw, generalized construction.

Incised strokes and calligraphic slashes dominate these small exercises. One picture is a geometric construction, codifying the organic and constructive manner in which the paintings of this series occupy their canvas. Another small piece is suspended on its ground, much like one of the series’ larger paintings, the ground of which is a pale pinkish stain on which fat streaks of lavender and orange/red hover as a massive glyph or action.

Graffiti, as the artist’s inspiration, is a signature of urbanity, where people have coalesced, created and excreted their presences to the extent of apparent indelibility. Frischenschlager talks of the loss of a particularly magnificent downtown Manhattan graffiti mural that he admired, erased by the heavy-handed decisiveness of a community board. Which makes it a dearth that fuels his creative output with these paintings. Or anger. The impulse, in graffiti as in so much we do, includes its own readiness to fade, while paintings are interesting artifacts: always ambitious to be viewed in the future, and navigated using future measures of value.

But the past, we are reminded in Frischenschlager’s loud blends of passion and relic, always includes both the present, and any futures.

Alan Lockwood writes on art for New York Press, covering topics from the opening of Dia:Beacon contemporary art museum to sound art, and artists such as Joan Mitchell, Weegee and Jeff Koons.

[ top ]

The New Works 2006-pres.

The Evolution Paintings 1995-2005

	Immersed in Emergence Review by Alan Lockwood

	My Artistic Imperative Essay by C. Frischenschlager

The Graffiti Paintings 1996-1998

Fire Oven (Tapestry) 1994-1995

The Student Years 1990-1995