White Balance

By daylight, during the gallery's opening hours, Alexander Wolff's exhibition reveals itself quite differently than it does by night, as seen from outside through the showroom windows. The artist has mounted a series of paintings in the gallery, some in vibrantly colorful tones, others in subtle whites, or completely black, another in black-and-white, directing the focus onto their visuality and technique through their painterly qualities. As in earlier works, each painting results from an elaborate production process, committed to the interplay between the picture plane and the picture, between the canvas and the paint: pieces of fabric are dyed, printed, occasionally spray-painted or painted and sewn together, to perhaps in the following steps once again be dyed, cut and recombined into new constellations. Through the process of dying the canvas the color not only lies upon the surface of the painting, but permeates the canvas entirely in a complete intertwining of picture plane and color. This self-imposed principal of printing and dying, of montage and démontage of the canvas, establishes a no-longer-clearly-defined relationship between the picture plane and the picture, an effect that becomes further amplified through the use of fabric pieces that are sewn together in such a way that seams remain visible, being turned out toward the front of the canvas, as determined by how the painting is stretched and mounted. Resistance to the familiar conventions of painting is further carried out through the serial production of the composition's segments. Each painting is square-shaped, composed of four equal quadrants, with a central point around which eight elements are arranged; these are interchangeable, combinable and optically rotatable. All rotated towards the center, the elements form a target. The paintings themselves may also be rotated and have no pre-defined orientation; in this way they resist the optical illusion of gravity. This practice of working against the limits of an "optical gravity" was already programmatic for historic Abstraction, whose overall authoritative gesture Wolff simultaneously rejects: the paintings' numbered titles, Seventeen (Eighteen, Nineteen,..., etc.) Alternative to..., the commitment to an alternative indicates an open-ended series - there will always be further variations. Alexander Wolff began this series for an exhibition in the Kunsthalle Lingen, located directly adjacent to a state prison. Exhibited there, and only visible for the prisoners, the motif in the series unfolded with quite another effect: the target as a means for relieving boredom and frustration. That the paintings might, within the current exhibition, offer the framework for some unknown action is suggested through the installed LED spotlights. Evenings after closing time, the gallery transforms into a kind of showcase in which a spectacle unfolds for passers-by. In continuous progression, the paintings are illuminated by the RGB colors: red, green and blue. The gallery space becomes a colorscape, the paintings undergo a dynamic transformative process, and that which one has just seen is superceded by new a color impulse, dissolves, changes again; new pictures are briefly evoked, only to then again disappear or melt into one another. Perhaps not in the sense of full sensual immersion, but to the extent that one's impressions are no longer clearly distinguishable. This brings not only a destabilizing and disorienting element to the work, but reveals the discovery of a further method of multiplication, generating ever different results. With this approach of providing the viewer with multiple variations, the formal authority of the autonomous work of art is suppressed in favor of a greater potential for activation and porousness. This approach is carried out beyond the borders of the canvas, extending to the common conventions of exhibition practice. When Alexander Wolff then photographs a painting composed of white-tones alternately with green, blue and red light and composites these images to produce a color-neutral RGB jpeg for the invitation announcement, or when he contrasts the white cube with an RGB lightshow, then he is not only creating a situation in order to expose particular normative formats as a construction, but at the same time it becomes the possibility to generate a new picture.

Nikola Dietrich