Artists

Constanza Meléndez Tohá, Samuel Fischer-Glaser

Press release

Constanza Meléndez Tohá, Samuel Fischer-Glaser / ORDENANZA Constanza Meléndez Tohá (born 1983) by Angela Stiegler The selection of images by Constanza Meléndez for »Ordenanza« are portrait and landscape formats. Their motives are heterogeneous and hard to unify under a topic. Their compositions suggest to call them portraits, although none of them shows a face. In each image one thing calls the first attention: Legs, a pair of chairs, a flag, a plant, a tree branch, a stack of sunloungers, a brand, a pack of toast. The way these images are made turns out to be an invitation to the photographic experience. One of the first images I saw out of Meléndez' camera pictured a row of letters plastered on a wall in public space. The mural would read: VAETRALND. This could be read as »Vaterland« translated as homeland or fatherland – »patria«, so the land of the fathers. The constructedness of this specific image and word helps me read the images captured by the same eye, with a different camera though. In the last months Constanza invited people to join into this process for several occasions: At the cellar of a museum (Museum Brandhorst), in a container in the middle of a park (Der Fahrende Raum), in a residency in the Bavarian forest (Schiesslhaus AiR). Only as you stand there in pitch darkness, searching for the instrument to open the film to then process into the container up to the developer bath, the balance between light and lens that as one result creates an image, makes sense. The same light creating this picture can delete it in the same glimpse of a second. Samuel Fischer-Glaser (born 1992) by Justin Lieberman Samuel Fischer-Glaser is an artist who is concerned with the relationship of politics and art. He is also concerned with the autonomy of the artistic process. These two concerns have produced a very contemporary forking of his artistic path. The most visible aspect of Samuel's work consists of public spectacles which are a burlesque of German memorial culture, often created in collaboration with the artist Angela Stiegler. Samuel's Furniture Dealer Drawings are the other side of this coin. They are an attempt to recoup some degree of autonomy through a 'retour à l'ordre'. The association was spurred by Samuel's idiosyncratic choice of picture frames and the graphomanic density of his mark-making. The frames are examples of a regional folk art woodcarving tradition here in Germany. Their notched ridges create a musical contrapunto with the marks in the drawings themselves. Through the regularity of the ticks which compose the furniture dealer drawings, this autonomy has the look of marking time. And marking time is the activity of the interregnum, a span in which the old order is crumbling and the new one is not yet in sight. The forms into which these ticks congeal are monsters, radiant, sometimes many-eyed, sometimes inhabiting ordinary domestic spheres. It is in this way that the furniture dealer drawings are politically astute. Through process, they recall perfectly Antonio Gramsci's assessment of interregnum: that it produces monsters.