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Alex Müller, das Wüstenhallo, 2018, Tusche,
Graphit auf Leinwand, 89x100cm
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Andreas Sell, German Evangelical Gay - #2, 2012, foam, MDF, synthetic leather,
metal screws, 370 (l) x 154 (b) x 272 (h), Photo courtesy: Jule Felice Frommelt
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| Raul Walch, The Sceptical Chemist, 2018 |
The Sceptical Chemist
The Sceptical Chymist wanders through life undocumented. The figure is both one of a reactionary nature and ghost of life. It observes from a vantage point that others never decide to tread. The Sceptical Chymist is not an agent in the network but the Gardner of the Rhizome.Raul Walch is both the Sceptical Chymist, the Artist, the Viewer and the Ethnographer. His installations mark a world of his own viewing and that of his own making. This can be seen both as the Imaginarium and the Archive. In his new works, he guides the viewer into infinite drifting angles of clandestine territories, criss-cross woven textile sheets make up the body of this new border. These monotone Spanish plastic architectures discreetly hide the mass-manufactured winter vegetable urban fuel line from Spain to Germany. An epic bed of white plastic crusts the southern tip of Spain. Covert yet visible via Google Earth, not a human in sight. Only the words Death King „Earth Warriors“are found by Walch as he conducts his pilgrimage into another world, a deeper web of the unseen polyethylene lies beyond the gateway we now know as our life.In 2008 Boris Groys argued in “Art Power” that since the 1960s artists have created installations that perform services to selection processes rather than just creativity. A distinction between the (curated) exhibition and the (artistic) installation is naturally still able to be made ten years on, but he argued it is essentially obsolete to do so. He goes on to add that the use of such practices works well with demonstrating the material of a specific civilisation because the artist installs all the elements that typically circulate in the abstracted emotion of life, bringing them into one place, in one time. The artist gives the viewer a room with a vantage point, not just a view.In doing so…Walch opens up this gateway and allows us to ponder on his unframed view – Do we wish we were there? Or are we already there? These binary fucks tread softly all over Raul Walch’s new work, distopias seduce utopias, pesticides covertly form negated idealised aesthetics and caring bodies shift between plastic; under the guise of maternal illegal labour. Walch simultaneously veils and reveals his knowledge to the viewer via his site-specific installational formats.Text of the current show at EIGEN & ART Lab by Penny Rafferty.