Is there a place where the pictures are created?
Or rather, is there a place where Bernard Ammerer's pictures are created?
Does he think them up, invent them or does he find them and let them happen?
And where exactly do they form?
Obviously, the artist's works are committed to reality, to the depiction of something real, and obviously there is something that permanently irritates this first impression.
The current exhibition at the FREY Gallery in Salzburg comprises two major themes, with various works following on from the artist's earlier motifs. These are paintings that are commonly referred to as "figurative". Bernard Ammerer paints "classically", oil on canvas, and there are smaller and a number of medium-sized formats. These paintings seem to relate to each other through their formats, they appear to be the expression of an overriding concern.
The viewer is confronted with various people or figures, all of whom are depicted in empty or only implied spaces. Full of energy and exuberance could be the first, superficial impression of these somersaulting figures. But the bodies in the act of jumping or free-falling float above a vague, chessboard-like pattern. A jogger, almost life-size and with even facial features, is heading directly towards the viewer. However, the space in which she is running has dissolved into a few perspective lines, just as the landscape below the man in a pensive pose, "cropped" and mounted in the picture, has been reduced to a graphic and suggestive abstraction.
The irritating effect of this and similar works by the artist is based on the relationship between figure and background. The figure/ground relationship as one of the most essential means of transforming a two-dimensional surface into a picture/image is thematized here as such and thus "lifted" into the narrative. The narration, the obvious content of the picture, thus contains a subliminal message that will resonate with the viewer.
As if to reinforce this play with meta-levels, the melancholic thinker is assigned a large cloud painting. Perhaps it can ground him, but the fact that it is only a picture, a detail, is clearly indicated by the white, untreated part of the picture in the lower third.
Painting, even that "based on nature", creates the illusion of space through the application of paint.
How this illusion creates presence contributes significantly to the message of the picture.
For a second group of works in this exhibition, the artist seems to have adopted the opposite strategy. Now it is not groundlessness and a lack of anchoring in perspective that cause the discomfort. Landscape, forest, wheat field are present, some curved lines credibly suggest the lake in which a small boy is standing. What is he doing there? In the forest, which seems lively and familiar, figures can be seen in a semi-transparent manner, disappearing between the trees.
They are like signs of another level of reality. Another lake, another little boy: this time the lake becomes an oversized wave that threatens to engulf everything. A huge distortion that appears to be self-evident - just a slight rotation of the picture plane, it seems!
This leads back to the question: where do the pictures come from?
"For a long time I went to bed early." begins the novel, which embarks on a search for lost time. In the intermediate realm of awakening, those involuntary memories are formed over which consciousness has no influence. The "Memoires involontaires" resemble the images that the painter channels past the rational mind and uses for his dreamlike pictorial inventions. He captures enigmatic elements as a direct expression of the imaginary; in a waking state they would disappear again. The unconscious uses metaphor and metonymy, both linguistic structures, for the sake of representability. By shifting and condensing, these images and the narratives they contain acquire a general character.
This "work of representability" is performed a second time by painting.
The fleeting picture/image becomes a tableau, but with it something of the incomprehensible and unspeakable returns through the means of painting. In the reality level of the picture, the "as-if" of a realistic representation, an imaginary residue remains as an irritation.
- Text about the exhibition by Daniela Hölzl
The artist has committed himself to figurative painting and painterly realism and shows decisive moments in his pictures, situations on the brink, bodies at the extreme limit of endurance, scenes from everyday life in youth culture. The pictorial events cannot be fully grasped; the protagonists in Ammerer's pictures connect with the viewer as if they were inviting them to think about the situation further.
.jpg)
