Francesco Finizio, Sylvie Ungauer: ver/schiebungen, curated by, Ulrike Kremeier, 22.07. - 20.08.2011 Kunstverein Tiergatren Galerie Nord, Turmstr. 75 10551 Berlin. DE, by craniv boyd.

Francesco Finizio, Sylvie Ungauer: ver/schiebungen, curated by, Ulrike Kremeier, 22.07. - 20.08.2011 Kunstverein Tiergatren Galerie Nord, Turmstr. 75 10551 Berlin. DE, by craniv boyd.

 

A non- for- profit municipal art exhibition venue holds one, refreshingly light hearted, art exhibition, with two artists who both have some connexion to Bretagne and the city of Brest, in France. "ver/schiebungen" places the works of artists Francesco Finizio, and Sylvie Ungauer, on display and both artists work divergent, on their own, yet rare enough for contemporary art practice, both of their current art creation involves drawing, to some level.

 

Francesco Finizio, has made a silent auction for a set of: low cost cheap materials. Objects that all-though ad-hoc, in both: appearance and utilitarian function, fill the larger frame of a previous, questionably, site specific, artwork created, and documented in France. That work is a projected video loop, in the same room as the objects for sale, and from still photographs that cycle through the video loop, one can see the playful, many lives, of all those random lots, which lean against the wall in a room in Kunstverein Tiergatren Galerie Nord. Stones, blankets, newspapers, a plywood case, a plywood dis-assembling crucifix, plastic basins, coffee maker, wash powder and other items all reconfigured by the artist, over a seven day period, in a store front space on a street Rue des Etables 1, in Brest, a city in the Celtic part of France, with the purpose of transforming inconspicuous commercial space in a shrinking city, with the economy of means and rigor of method available to a true artist. One day the space is a laundry mat, the wash basins for hand washing clothing, another day the window announces that the space is a church, the same plastic basins are filled with rocks as a decorative element for the altar of gods house for that day, come back on a different day and the space is advertised as a mini-golf course, the plastic tubs, both with and without stones are ramparts and barricades for the mini golfer, a quick hotel, or funeral home, press office or peep show, or parking lot, scaled for skate boards rather than cars. Francesco Finizio, with only the disparate and trashy things, self-selected, and on view in the silent auction has created, archetypes of spaces where life in our current age happens. The humour and absurdity in the artwork is side bar, to the Spartan means, that illustrate and create different spaces with the exact same stuff.

 

Equally if not more bizarre, the artworks of Sylvie Ungauer, which span the crafts of drawing, wig making, video filming, and basket weaving as sculpture. Exacting drawings from fashion periodicals are set with a strange twist, a familiar word in an all too specific letter form, Psycho, and a pouting woman in stilettos wearing a hat? No, she has on instead, the house that Norman Bates lived in in A. Hitchcock's classic thriller. Le Mepris, as drawing by, Sylvie Ungauer, features a floor seated barefoot woman in a mini dress, she looks headless, but rather the, cult like-iconic via J.L. Godard, film, Italian Razzionalizmo style villa on an island covers the head of the bare foot drawn woman. She looks like she could be looking like B. Bardot in that 60's era film right now.

 

Quizzical also, the large woven from magnetic tape interconnected sculptures that look like Pyramids, Towers and Ziggurat, the interest of millinery and wig making become more clear when presented together with a video from the year 2006, by Ungauer. This video loop, is, in my mind just as much about strange youthful people, wearing black wigs with hair fibers that reach their knees, with nothing to do in a smallish city in sea-side France, as the iconic and brutal looking modernist architecture that the wig wearers take pause to walk past and observe. The video has a sound track with faintly recognizable thirty seconds and under samples of music that could fit in a spaghetti western film. The three characters mill about Brest, and are all braided to on another in the large wig all three wear. There movements are carefully measured and sloth like through out the video, which takes the form of, dawn to dusk «a day in the life of» and compresses it,with the wig bearers seated leaning against the wall of a building on a public street, like beggars, weary of asking for alms. By craniv boyd.