MARKUS SAILE
“scala”
19.04.2022 > 22.05.2022
A+B Gallery is pleased to present Markus Saile’s second solo exhibition titled scala, with a new series of works that explore the most important aspects of the artist’s practice.
For the first time, the artist confronts himself with the new gallery spaces, a fundamental aspect for Saile’s works that can have eccentric formats and touch the room in which they are placed in. They can be put near the corners or the perimeter of doors and windows, to establish a dynamic relationship with the space and the walls (and their irregularities) that become the place of the paintings’ energetic expansion and of the staging, scenographic too. Above all the artist’s act is an instrument of reinvention of space through unexpected differences of proportion and scale, as the title of the exhibition, scala, suggests. Saile’s paintings develop from a process of overlapping layers of paint and thin veils, which identify their material life. This aspect allows the artist to intervene with a gesture that can be seen in many ways: it can be a rhizomatic twist and a simple squiggle, or the landing to a hypothesis of figure, that refers back to details – like flaps of clothes and outlines of clouds – and to fliying forms typical of the paintings of the Seventeenth century, which Saile also evokes for the tones of his works and as an idea of scenographic image. The artist’s gesture can be also understood as a sign that never finish to emphasize the presence of the hand and the brush, which could be considered an excrescence and an exploration and exfoliation act of the stratification. Lastly, the painting movement can be the landing place of a process in which the inside and the outside, the before and the after, seem to mingle and relaunch themselves reciprocally. Moreover, these forms can touch the painting at different points: they can be placed in the center of the image and generate new backgrounds (with an assertive presence or similar to erasures) or they can replicate themselves with variations and be arranged in several rows. These images can be also translated into lines that explore the surface in a sinuous, curvilinear way, or with an intermittent and syncopated course, thus interrupting themselves at the limits of the surface. The resulting image is an invitation to the spectator to get closer, to explore the painting and its material articulations, to occupy more positions in front of it.