PREVIEW :: KAI TEICHERT, LINGUA FRANCA, BERLIN

Lingua Franca, a solo exhibition by artist Kai Teichert will open at Saarländische Galerie in Berlin on May 16th, 2013. The exhibition will be a foray into the world that Teichert makes on canvas with lush oil paint.  Focusing on recognizable, everyday objects, the artist delves headfirst into a theatrical set of his own making. There is a psychological, pseudo-sexual darkness which eludes to movement although quite still. His marriage of these objects is somehow wildly contemporary, translating the ancient trickery of painting and renewing our faith in gestures and marks on canvas. Birds, tires, bones, and wood become the players in this display of work spanning just about 20 years.

Mememto mori lays thick and invisibly in the air around Teichert’s work. There is a temptation of fate that is both ominous and playful. As viewers we are comforted by the objects that many of us have experienced; skulls, melons, Goodyear Tires, the raw nakedness of our own bodies. The paint itself tells the story as it fluidly glides around the confines of the canvas, sometimes an impasto other times a thin veil. A scientific impossibility presents itself in several works, or rather is it the realm of unexpectedness that challenges us to question gravity, scale and the invisible nuances that determine gender and sexual preference.

The components of Lingua Franca consist of  paintings from several different bodies of work spanning from 1994 to the present including “Substantia Nigra”. The term “substantia nigra” is Latin and assigned to describing nerve cells in the midbrain or mesencephalon. This area is high in melanin and is responsible for uncontrolled physical movement. Thirty-two square format, painted canvases make up “Substantia Nigra” and many offer a glimpse through the canvas and into the structure of which it is constructed. The surface acts as an x-ray machine, revealing the inner workings, the intersecting stretcher bars that give the canvas it’s structure. The shape, all too familiar to many, is reminiscent of a cross and Teichert often treats it as such. Referencing religion and religious symbology we are invited into the indeterminate catastrophe that comes with imbalance, however the square format paintings are indeed balanced and bilaterally divided; left brain, right brain, artistic versus scientific hypothesis.

Inside the structure of the exhibition is a structure made by the artist. Many of the paintings will be installed in a cylindrical maze of sorts. A shape that one might expect to find executed by Richard Serra in dense metal. Instead Teichert has formed the shape with a painted surface. The boundaries of physical space  invite us into psychological territory and as a dream, safe, unsafe, constructed of matter and what appears to be mostly subconscious. Lingua Franca is a delicious romp through art history, a voyeuristic glimpse into an artists mind and although relying on the age old tradition of painting, as individualistic as a fingerprint.

Opening: Thursday, 16 , 2013, 7pm-9pm