Valentin Magaro

April 19 - May 24 2009

The distinction between inanimate material and animate beings is anything but unambivalent in Valentin Magaro; bizarre buildings seem to have sprung from self-organising growth whereas the human being always emerges in strongly schematic form. Even though an iconographic interpretation might function on the grounds that individual motifs have meaning, no adequate approach to Magaro's pictorial universe is possible. Nevertheless a framing content, in which the individual pictorial elements appear as absolutely cogent, results from his medial and structural strategies of pictorial invention. The interplay between, on the one hand, evoked yet, on the other, non-denotable meaning is central to Magaro's examination of aesthetics and, as receptive and responsive as it is, opens up a highly binding content dimension. This becomes clear even in the combination of a pictorial process of form invention which actually derives from a digital medium. Translating this into drawing by hand is linked with considerable craftsmanly discipline and is very time-consuming: correctly applied craftsmanship - scientific drawing - is transformed by the way in which it is handled into something utterly absurd and, in this, it follows the logic of digital image generation. The show at Kunsthalle shows painting as well as a wide range of most recent drawings; particularly interesting are some small size objects as they are the first three-dimensional works by the artist. On occasion of the exhibition a comprehensive monography is published by Arnoldsche Art Publishers.

Oliver Kielmayer