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Visual Confetti by Olga Nowotny
The writer Michael Newman describes drawing as a medium characterized by removal and departure, ”Drawing, with each stroke, re-enacts desire and loss. Its peculiar mode of being lies between the withdrawal of the trace in the mark and the presence of the idea it prefigures”.
In A Note on Cravings the female body stands on the borderline between resolution and reconfiguration. The blank space of the paper unfolds as white surfaces for the beholders projections. The torso is left without a head. Legs wander of alone in high heels and an open mouth accompanies a hand with a pair of painted nails. A black triangle and a red dot trigger connotations of a raspberry coloured nipple and a dark crotch together with a pair of grasping hands. The fragmented pieces create a coherent unit in an imaginary silhouette. In other parts of the series the different units depart from circulating around a unifying figure to expand into independent parts of visual riddles. The triangle reappears – now accompanied with other geometric forms echoing the grammar of the suprematist movement, some solid coloured in the pallet of Johannes Ittens primary colour wheel, with the blue, red and yellow signifying colours of the Bauhaus movement. Even the line is in a stage of emergence or resolution, fragmentary thin or floating as solid paths of ink, mapping the paper. Some of the figures echo a more commercial language from the 1950s and 60s as with a pair of thick painted eyes placed upside-down and framed in a rectangle that share its dimensions with the billboard or the film screen. Or when a thin line rises from the shoe shank of a stiletto to become a seam in a twisted silk stocking. Animals also continue to reappear as in the repeated image of two copulating dogs or in the form of a small white cat with a red tongue. This visual landscape seems at first glance to invite readings centered around sexual desire with the fetishizing close-ups of the fragmented body parts and the controlled lines echoing constructivism, but I see this as a secondary story and that the real desire lies elsewhere.
Gantriis’ images create a rich layered fabric based on its intertextuality as a pond of images where figures rise to the surface only to sink again and circulating around a collective memory of imagery rather than unfolding a personal narrative. It is pointing towards the idea that identity is created through what Fredric Jameson refers to as a pastiche in relation to already existing visual imagery, hereby confronting the beholders search for a coherent storyline in the fragmented landscape of images. The black dog that penetrates its partner resonates a tradition of allegorical animal tales only to transform in a process of repetition and cropping leaving the back parts of the bodies merged in a graphic pattern.
There is no steady symbolism or reading implied in the figures as Gantriis effectively uses the collage technique to recontextualize the different components in her work. Both the time and the storyline are broken and from the debris raise a series of strong images. The desire lies in the visual exploring of a multitude of form languages thereby creating her own vocabulary. No shape its left alone. The clean cut geometric designs are turned and repositioned in different settings, from a balloon to a crotch to mimicking the shape of the stiletto and back again The forms and figures seem to transform into visual exclamation marks as the line caresses the shape of the figures. Gantriis explores the last century’s obsession with the visual image through her personal cravings for the media and the very ink itself.
She leaves an exquisite trace of desire behind.
The writer Michael Newman describes drawing as a medium characterized by removal and departure, ”Drawing, with each stroke, re-enacts desire and loss. Its peculiar mode of being lies between the withdrawal of the trace in the mark and the presence of the idea it prefigures”.
In A Note on Cravings the female body stands on the borderline between resolution and reconfiguration. The blank space of the paper unfolds as white surfaces for the beholders projections. The torso is left without a head. Legs wander of alone in high heels and an open mouth accompanies a hand with a pair of painted nails. A black triangle and a red dot trigger connotations of a raspberry coloured nipple and a dark crotch together with a pair of grasping hands. The fragmented pieces create a coherent unit in an imaginary silhouette. In other parts of the series the different units depart from circulating around a unifying figure to expand into independent parts of visual riddles. The triangle reappears – now accompanied with other geometric forms echoing the grammar of the suprematist movement, some solid coloured in the pallet of Johannes Ittens primary colour wheel, with the blue, red and yellow signifying colours of the Bauhaus movement. Even the line is in a stage of emergence or resolution, fragmentary thin or floating as solid paths of ink, mapping the paper. Some of the figures echo a more commercial language from the 1950s and 60s as with a pair of thick painted eyes placed upside-down and framed in a rectangle that share its dimensions with the billboard or the film screen. Or when a thin line rises from the shoe shank of a stiletto to become a seam in a twisted silk stocking. Animals also continue to reappear as in the repeated image of two copulating dogs or in the form of a small white cat with a red tongue. This visual landscape seems at first glance to invite readings centered around sexual desire with the fetishizing close-ups of the fragmented body parts and the controlled lines echoing constructivism, but I see this as a secondary story and that the real desire lies elsewhere.
Gantriis’ images create a rich layered fabric based on its intertextuality as a pond of images where figures rise to the surface only to sink again and circulating around a collective memory of imagery rather than unfolding a personal narrative. It is pointing towards the idea that identity is created through what Fredric Jameson refers to as a pastiche in relation to already existing visual imagery, hereby confronting the beholders search for a coherent storyline in the fragmented landscape of images. The black dog that penetrates its partner resonates a tradition of allegorical animal tales only to transform in a process of repetition and cropping leaving the back parts of the bodies merged in a graphic pattern.
There is no steady symbolism or reading implied in the figures as Gantriis effectively uses the collage technique to recontextualize the different components in her work. Both the time and the storyline are broken and from the debris raise a series of strong images. The desire lies in the visual exploring of a multitude of form languages thereby creating her own vocabulary. No shape its left alone. The clean cut geometric designs are turned and repositioned in different settings, from a balloon to a crotch to mimicking the shape of the stiletto and back again The forms and figures seem to transform into visual exclamation marks as the line caresses the shape of the figures. Gantriis explores the last century’s obsession with the visual image through her personal cravings for the media and the very ink itself.
She leaves an exquisite trace of desire behind.