Marita Fraser. Modern Love

Transcription

1 Modern Love

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3 Modern Love

4 Cover: Marita Fraser Untitled Diagram (detail), 2008 Acrylic on Linen 40 x 40 cm Right: Marita Fraser Seasons in the Abyss, 2007 mixed media

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6 A Love of Diagrams Recent Work by Marita Fraser Abstraction attacks representation, it seeks the form of the real. It is precisely this ontological ambition that gives abstract painting relevance today. Nevertheless, we might ask whether the spiritual Geometric Abstraction laid out in its search for the transcendental has limited its effectiveness to a period we now often disparagingly call modernist. Abstract painting s rejection of language as a medium of representation was so forcefully rejected by Conceptual art that it has become a doxa of the contemporary. Although this is a problem, abstract painting s non-representational sensations can be recalibrated in order to produce a non-spiritual form, a sensation that constructs the real through a material diagram. In this way abstract painting can re-engage with living processes and purge itself of its desire for the beyond. The Above: Marita Fraser Untitled Diagram, 2008 Acrylic on Linen 40 x 40 cm

7 recent work of Marita Fraser explores two such strategies, it connects abstraction to the physicality of the material, and it constructs abstract diagrams of the material unconscious. In the series of paintings Untitled Diagram from 2008 we see soft puddles of paint spread out by gravity. Not only does the plastic sensuality of the colour suggest a smooth but soft skin, but its registration of gravitational force also touches us. As well, the transferral of the drip onto a vertical canvas (it is painted separately) creates an epidermal dislocation that is physical. This Untitled Diagram is abstract in the sense that it is not a representation of a set of relations, but it is an entirely actual abstraction because it materialises these relations in its body. The diagram s operation is therefore neither conscious nor linguistic, but entirely unconscious. Fraser s paintings indicate this in their progression, from the overlapping circles recalling a mathematical diagram, to the vaguely osmotic boarders of abutting bio-masses, to the fold and splash of the Rorschach blot illuminating the dark and bizarre foundations of the mind. But Fraser s Rorschach blot, which she elegantly extends in Love of Diagrams (test) (2008), no longer asks us for a (conscious) word for a (unconscious) desire, because its formal rigour (its two-dimensionality and its colour, to speak like modernists) and its tactile qualities (its physicality, to not speak like modernists) provide us with an abstract sensation that cannot be represented. The Rorschach blot painting now acts as a diagram of the real, constructing a material physicality of which we are not conscious but we feel. The Love of Diagrams series was begun in 2006, in works that often feature circles. In Love of Diagrams (the swan painting) (2007) a black circle takes up most of the canvas, while two swans swim in corners. The work presents the opposition between the material two-dimensionality of abstraction and the representation of three dimensions in the starkest

8 possible terms. This opposition is quickly eroded however, as the swans are sucked into the black hole. In Seasons in the Abyss (2007) this abyss appears twice over, in the scenic image of a man standing perilously close to the edge of a cliff, and in the circle cut out of the work that reveals the wall behind. Abstraction now fully intervenes within representation, puncturing its worn clichés of the sublime. But abstraction is not simply the return of the repressed, as Black Painting (II) (2008) reveals. The black felt attached directly to the wall surrounding its empty circle to encompass the wall behind echoes modernist experiments with shaped canvases, while also evoking the wall removals of Conceptual artist Lawrence Wiener. Wiener intended his work to express its genetic and linguistic concept (the dimensions of the removal and the idea to do so), an effective reversal of abstract painting s exploration of sensation. The physical removal of the centre of Black Painting (II) opens the field of abstraction onto the world. But in doing so it reveals the world to be exactly as the painting is, material and abstract. Abstraction is able to reconnect to life at precisely this point, where it creates sensations acting as diagrams of the material unconscious. Finally then, Fraser s paintings achieve a return to Modernism that re-energises its non-representational strategies for the present. Her work casts a post-conceptual eye over abstraction, which purges it of any spiritualism. Fraser s affirmation of the material and the unconscious refuses language, offers instead mysterious diagrams abstract sensations - for constructing the real. Stephen Zepke, Stephen Zepke is the author of Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari and co editor of Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New.

9 Love of Diagrams (test), 2008 Acrylic on Linen 130 x 90 cm

10 Installation view, Junger, Immanece, Paris, 2008 Black Painting II 2008, Love of Diagrams (test) 2008, Felt Mountain (target) 2008, Felt, Acrylic on Linen,

11 Untitled Diagram, 2008 Acrylic on Linen 40 x 40 cm

12 Love of Diagrams (The Swan Painting), 2007 Oil on Canvas 110 x 110 cm

13 Love of Diagrams (Test 2), 2007 Oil on Canvas 110 x 110 cm

14 Installation view EN BLOC, Karlsruhe Love of Diagrams, Acrylic Paint Skins dimentions variable

15 Paint Mountain (target), 2007 Acylic Paint Skin on support 100 x 100 x 100 cm

16 Installation view, I ll be right back, Peloton, Sydney, 2005 Acylic Paint on Canvas

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18 Jenseits, 2008 Plaster Dimentions variable

19 MARITA FRASER 2007 Master Class Heimo Zobernig Academy of Fine Art, Vienna 2005 Bachelor of Visual Arts (1st class honours) Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney 2004 Master Class Muntean + Rosenblum Academy of Fine Art, Vienna Solo shows 2008 Modern Love, James Dorahy Project Space, Sydney 2006 Marita Fraser, bell street project space, Vienna 2005 I ll be right back, Peloton, Sydney 2004 Recent Work with Paint, Academy of Fine Art, Vienna Selected Group shows 2008 SkulpTULLN, City of Tulln, Austria Con Art Fair, Vienna Here comes the Ocean, Ferenbalm-Gurbrü Station, Karlsruhe Existance in a Letter, Cluster, Berlin (curated by Barbara Buchmaier) Junger, Immanence, Paris 2007 Work in Progress, Forum +, Concertgebouw, Brugge Aktuelle Positionen der abstrakten Malerei, Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe, Ettlingen Spiel weiter noch, Pudel Kollektion, Hamburg Spiel weiter du süsses etwas, Cluster, Berlin Seasons in the Abyss, Mop, Sydney 2006 Stupid as a painter, brick 5, Vienna The Invisible Reading Room, Firstdraft, Sydney CMKY, bell street project space Vienna, Vienna Biennale 06 Trafik, a Peloton Project, Sydney 2005 Helen Lempriere Finalist Exhibition, Artspace, Sydney The Conception Show, Phatspace, Sydney Punch, Mop, Sydney Radical Painting, Space 3, Sydney Residencies 2008 Cité International des Arts, Paris 2008 Artist in Residence, Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney Awards Grants Scholarships 2008 NAVA Marketing Grant 2007 The NSW Arts Gallery, Moya Dyring Studio, Cité des Arts, Paris 2005 Zelda Stedman Scholarship, University of Sydney 2003 Fauvette Loureiro Scholarship, University of Sydney Many thanks to Alex Lawler, Stephen Zepke and Jim Morton. All images copyright Marita Fraser, 2008.

20 This project was assisted by a Marketing Grant for NSW Artists administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) through funding from Arts NSW, an agency of the New South Wales Government. Image: Marita Fraser, Untitled Diagram, 2008