Patrick Cierpka
diorama

May 2nd – June 13th, 2009

German artist Patrick Cierpka (born 1967) in his work struggles with the complex link between reality and both its medial disseminations and the consequences this fusion of reality and its reproductions has on the creation of his images. While his media-driven approach is very energetic and creates significant tension between his figurative and abstract subjects, it is at the same time a pure and colour-saturated painting. Making use of the extraordinary palette of colours from street art, he combines it with the conventional colour system to create something perhaps best describe as changeling paintings.

The artist’s presence on the international scene includes participation in the Year_06 Art Project in London and the promising SWAB Art Fair in Barcelona in 2008 as well as NEXT in Chicago and the VOLTA show in New York.

… Patrick Cierpka’s paintings are collages of abstract expanses and figurative elements. The relationship between expanse and the figure varies; often people are painted small in contrast to the space: emptiness dominates. Hispainting “auf der leinwand” depicts an embracing couple kissing passionatel, apparently making a final gesture of connection before the transition to an uncertain future. Here also the painting is dominated by a large, brown, almost threatening expanse; a vast background that hints only the worst, almost smothering the couple.

Take a closer look, and it is possible to discern a faint vertical structure with a suggestion that the brown substance is brittle, perhaps about to disintegrate into strips at any moment, revealing a view of what lies beyond. So the kiss is a goodbye, as the background is fleeting and will only hide the new for a short time.

Patrick Cierpka traces the interaction between people and their surroundings. Sometimes figures appear immobile, hovering independently from the painting’s background as though lost in their surroundings; elsewhere they influence their surroundings. “monument” portrays a two-dimensional plinth set in the front of a large expanse, presumably a curtain, here also a thin, near transparent material dividing the present from the future. A man with an almost devilish grin is depicted reduced to a torso and bottled to the column, a though his legs have been removed so that he cannot run away.

He already has one finger hooked around the thin material. He is about to slit the material to reveal the hitherto
obscured unknown, illuminated by a glistening light source, a type to colourchanging sun, whose contours are already faded and blurred. The conflict between figure and background is almost tangible in Patrick Cierpka’s “feste farbe”. A boy shown in a room, a white cube, and he is starting to paint the wall, as though previously caught performing some pointless
activity that he now has erase. The drawings, the colourful and abstract chaos, the improvisation and the left side to the room remains, while everything on the opposite wall is covered and neutralised. The boy seems to be acting in a dichotomy: the necessity the leave behind the old times, to paint over them and achieve the temporary stage of emptiness, before then, like other of Cierpka’s protagonists, being faced with the decision of having to pass through a plane, an imaginary dividing wall. … (Ivo Götz)