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Exhibitions
- Otto Zitko
Otto Zitko
10/10/2015 - 07/11/2015
To mark the arrival of the new season – framed within the shared Opening programme – the Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery is presenting the third solo exhibition from the Austrian painter Otto Zitko (Vienna, 1959).
Following his initial spatial intervention in the gallery itself in 2002, and work on an ensemble of aluminium plates painted in situ in Madrid which made up his 2011 show, this time Zitko is interspersing both lines of production to generate a pictorial context in which the background is occupied by a mural intervention onto which are arranged various aluminium plates (the paintings themselves) which end up being sort of unique and autonomous fragments in the continuity of a large-scale line or scrawl which takes up the whole of the gallery space.
The pictorial process, slow and complex, which requires detailed studies of the conditions in which each project is undertaken (architecture, light, textures and surfaces) simulates a large calligraphic exercise, almost primitive, in which a dense and concentrated mass of lines, turns and curves cover a surface with automated gestures. What we see here is drawn writing, which although improvised on the walls as a primary mark and impulse, and with a certain appearance of being almost out of control, requires a considerable reflective charge. A two-dimensional illusion trapped in a three-dimensional context which acts as overwriting in the specificity of a space.
When faced with Zitko’s painting, the spectator, immersed in a transitional space, as various critics and historians have chosen to call it, undergoes a physical and psychological experience made up of the dualities interior/exterior, subject/object and private/shared.
Zitko’s drawing, linked on the one hand to the art brut label and on the other to Surrealist automatic writing, is defined around the staking out of an underlying and escapist path with regard to rational thought; its abstraction ends up proposing a transgressive language as opposed to the hegemonic rules of written grammar. Painting in a state that is sometimes defined, in Freudian terms, as pre-historic; preceding consciousness and prior even to the objective world and to the subject itself. Transitional space developed with a certain vulnerability which, far from the sublime and from the Pollockian all-over experience, keeps to an expansive abstraction in which scale, order and legibility construct a shared logic between semiotics and the pure presence of a physical gesture.
Spontaneous bursts, outpourings and automatisms jostle with pauses and reflective spaces tracing out movements at differing speeds, lengths, pressures and intensities that flow in a symphonic composition of lines, rhythms and tempos.