Markus Saile at A + B Gallery, solo booth, Art Cologne Neumarkt 2023
Markus Saile has developped an installative hanging of new works for his solo booth on site. They relate to the specific physical space with its various characteristics. Crucial here is the respective relationship between the architecture, the formats of the supports, and the spatial parameters within the images, such as marginal areas and edges, empty spaces, overlaps, etc., through which references between the single works have been established. The paintings create a syntax of fragments that remain open, and a poetic space of references.
Here, the Pipe paintings are a conceptual group of works by the artist which intervene in the syntax of this field of action in a specific way. With their elongated format they explore the transition between picture and object. Pipe is the English name for the vertical-bar punctuation mark now popular in informal writing practices within digital culture. At its most general, the symbol marks the end of one section and the beginning of another. It is a caesura, a cut, but one which at the same time reveals a connection.
Saile's works convene the space of painting, in a subtle interplay between the space where it is situated, the space it represents and the space it constructs in dialogue with architecture. Thus, the in between space, in between the paintings, creates a space where we stand and move, as viewers. Pictorial problems thus can be understood as architectural problems, in the sense of a socio-political structure. Beyond the in-situ and the context, it is an investigation into painting in volume, the depth of the surface, and the extension of this practice into a performative field of action.
The current paintings are created in a process of overlapping layers of paint and thin veils that reveal their material life. Paint deposits accumulate at the edges of the supports, revealing the temporal structure of the painting process like the annual rings of a tree and lending them an object-like quality. Gestural interventions dramatize the pictorial space in the sense of a stage situation. The conceptual work with the painterly gesture thus can be understood as a kind of performative re-enactment of its historical, temporal and spatial potentials. In the painting process, Saile creates volume in one brush movement, like they do on Blender to create forms. His method can therefore be related to the extrusion process in 3D programs. Instead of putting a series of points together in a line, which is the drawing perspective work, one brush flow creates a plane in one gesture.