By superimposing photographic images of fragmented architectures assembled by interlocking and misalignment, transparency and chromatic and luminous interference, Susa Templin delivers a kaleidoscopic vision of space. Discovered on the stand of the Anita Beckers gallery in Paris + by Art Basel, her compositions, displayed under plexiglass, have immediately seduced us for the harmonious softness of their assemblies, their chromatic variations, and the strangeness of their construction in mille-feuilles. We now understand their complexity, thanks to the exhibition at the Beckers gallery in Frankfurt, which confronts the works of Susa Templin (based in Frankfurt) with those of another artist who proceeds by superimposing layers, the painter Nick Dawes (based in London).
Nick Dawes, File, 2022, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm, unique piece
Nick Dawes, 25A, 2023, oil on canvas, 140 x 190 cm, unique piece
Juxtaposing and superimposing pieces of walls, stairs, and doors, Susa Templin creates new spaces, spatial abstractions destabilizing our gaze before dragging us into a new dimension. Contrary to the cubist paintings, of which certain compositions can seem to be close, it is not a question here of painting the real under all its facets, of showing it in its totality, under all the angles, but of transcending it, of abstracting the photographed space (and thus passing from the three dimensions to the flatness of the image) of the real.
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anita Beckers
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anita Beckers
In Windows Doors (Berlin), the geometric forms created by the reflections are superimposed on the initial image to compose, in the manner of geometric abstraction, an ambiguous space. In Lumière Espace Couleur, Susa Templin uses another derealizing process, that of repetition (to which the Centre Pompidou-Metz will soon dedicate its new exhibition), by declining the same motif (a window) in subtle chromatic variations.
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anita Beckers
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anita Beckers
As for Nick Dawes, it is to the spontaneous emergence of colored forms in a process of “controlled coincidence” that he devotes himself. Imbued with Goethe’s theory of colors and their “sensual and moral effect,” but also with that developed in the 1920s by the painter Johannes Itten on the coincidence of different colors and gradations, he seeks to give organic and unexpected forms to the surfaces of color that he superimposes by soaking, layer after layer, the canvas with a very diluted oil paint in a slow and repetitive process.
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anita Beckers
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anita Beckers
Stéphanie Dulout
Until March 11
Galerie Anita Beckers
Braubachstrasse 9, Frankfurt am Main
