Part I is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, a two-person show by Othmar Farré and Raphael Linsi titled Grand Opening. The exhibition will be on view from April 13-17 May, 2014, with an opening on the evening of April 12 from 7-10 p.m.
Farrés wall-mounted works are like advertisements for two opposing types of transportation: the painting-size Ferrari posters with geometric cut-outs look toward that most exclusive, expensive, cliché, macho status symbol on wheels–in the way that the posters‘ hypothetical owner would fantasize about owning a Ferrari poster, which is pretty much the opposite of actually owning a Ferrari. The complement of Ferrari‘s patent red is the green branding of the subway (a.k.aA. Underground, or Metro, or U-Bahn) in Frankfurt am Main. That‘s what Farrés other wall-mounted, painting-sized works depict: scenes in the German city‘s underground transportation system–controllers checking people‘s tickets, the architecture in and around the stations, the design of the train cars themselves. These posters have the same wave shape as a mirror sold at IKEA. And all this is enough to make one think again of our desire to identify with any sort of purchasable status symbol, and for what reasons, and for what reason this has been given form by Farre´ in a new contemporary art gallery in Cologne, as a kind of substitute for painting.
Linsi, for his part, actually made paintings–three of them, according to a curious process of spackling unbleached canvas, coating it with washing detergent powder, and then brushing some of it off with a paintbrush. Under the clean, clinical, fluorescent lighting of a gallery (which another artist once crassly, and brilliantly, called a „bleached asshole“)–under those lighting conditions, the idea of a cleaning detergent for art comes across as absurd, even redundant. (Dieter Roth‘s and Daniel Spoerri‘s work, by contrast, gives one the impression that a molding, ephemeral artwork might offer some bizarre appeal, as a luxury commodity that undermines itself.) The electric tea lights on the floor in front of Linsi‘s paintings are another false subversion: Their „natural“-colored light is as artificial as the fluorescent light, but worse for looking at art, because the fluorescents‘ cold flatness illuminates the works‘ every detail.
[…] Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light. […] –Dylan Thomas
–John Beeson
