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METAPHYSISCHE STILLEBEN
Artworks from the exhibition 30 April — 21 May 2011
Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney
An exhibition of 20 drawings.
The artist compensates for certain shortcomings in social behaviour
through his work. What he sacrifices for the sake of his work —
and this is generally infinitely much more than what the nice average
citizen would be capable of sacrificing — benefits everybody.
Hermann Hesse, in a letter from 1961
Where art is concerned, I know that, just as in any time in
the past, every true poem or painting, every measure of true music
is paid for in equal measure with life, with suffering, with blood.
Hermann Hesse, in a letter from 1932
Flinders Street gallery presents an elegant, cerebral collection
of Schranzer’s drawings in Metaphysische Stilleben,
a title originating after Carrà’s and de Chirico’s
Pittura Metafisica. Diverse forms and themes taken from
the biological and physical sciences, psychoanalysis, art history,
literature, and Pandeistic philosophy are spun together in a ‘super-‘
and ‘beyond-natural’ fabric (Greek meta, “beyond/after”,
physika, “physics/nature”). Objects morphed
or displaced from their original contexts and arranged in new spatial
and metaphoric relationships — removed from the ordinary world
pointing "to a higher, more hidden state of being" (Carrà),
and evoking the strange, inexplicable, and mysterious — are
presented in calm tableaux aligned to both Metaphysical and Oriental
art or, conversely, are amalgamated into pasticci more
awkward, crowded, and operatic. Though spatial ambiguities are apparent
in all Schranzer’s drawings, these ‘busier’ works
are made more disorientating by their extreme combinations of viewpoint,
orthographic and oblique projection, and converging perspective.
By logical extension, the drawings reveal his interest in the impossible
figures of perceptual psychology, and the world of reflectaphors,
similarity and ‘otherness’ (John Briggs’ thesis
on the structure of artworks, based on physicist David Bohm’s
theory of implicate/explicate order). One spies references to Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights, Van Eyck’s Portrait
of a Man in a Turban, Titian’s Man with a Glove,
de Chirico’s glove in The Song of Love, Max Ernst’s
Loplop persona, Uccello’s Vase in Perspective,
sitting alongside mechanical detritus, the labyrinthine curves of
inner ears, the calabi-yau forms of Super-String theory, and the
shame masks and medieval helmets from the Rüstkammer collections
of Europe. Not unexpectedly, the phallus raises its head! Man is
treated as a mannequin or manichino, a faceless doll in
full armour, or as a political ambassador literally ‘dick-headed’
— pollinated by the hands of Arcimboldo, Bellmer and Magritte.
Elsewhere, flayed penises morph into vases of columbines and strelitzias,
bringing to mind the extraordinarily crammed and superficial floral
arrangements found in 17th century Dutch painting as well as Breton’s
thesis that “Beauty should be convulsive, or not at all.”
The penis is drawn in an anatomically winged form that clearly links
the bird with magic, sexuality, innocence, potency and virility,
drawing upon Greek and Roman representations, 16th to 18th century
allegorical painting (Jean Baptist Grueze comes to mind), and 20th
century Surrealism. Clearly, such fantastic distillations are evidence
of an expanded, abundant — even tortured — faculty of
imagining!
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