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Blamescapes and Superflattenings
Art Station Dubulti, Jurmala, 2024
2018. Oil on canvas, 380 cm x 550 cm. LED display 30 cm x 130 cm. Photo: Valdis Jansons
Oil on canvas. 380 cm x 460 cm. Photo: Valdis Jansons
2018. Oil on canvas. 410 cm x 380 cm. Photo: Valdis Jansons
Reflection is the courage to question the truthfulness of knowledge and the space of its goals – it can be said not only by the philosopher Martin Heidegger but also by others, in particular context with Heidegger's intelligent sigh, that such "thinking is not necessary for everyone, and can be ineffective or even just unbearable". Miķelis Fišers new work exhibition can be read as the option that draws the reflection process: with a silence in almost uncontrollable outbursts in the series of colored pencil drawings or surrealistic frottages; with a "noisy" silence of almost unbearable, Dadaistic cries (voice by the artist), which stay “undressed“ even in the modern insulation material of The Little Wailing Wall (Floor II). And with the detailed narratives, full of illustrative material in large-scale paintings and with the precedent of narrative transformation from the visual matter to the textual one: the story, in its verbal intensity exceeding the painting potential, emanates from the painting as a "red thread" on the LED display (Floor I).
The observer from the distance can quite easily spot the extravaganza in Miķelis Fišers newest work. There are large paintings, new esoteric characters, and storylines, immersive and psychologically absorbing environments behind the figurative title “Blamescapes and Superflattenings”. There is a persistent narrative of morality in his work, though Miķelis Fišers chooses the language full of unscientific substances. Of all bodies of knowledge, he chooses knowledge without status and techniques of alternative criticality, which confirms the basic impact of science through deliberate unscientificity. With a power and with a weakness “Blamescapes and Superflattenings” challenges Heidegger's definition of the modern age: the world conceived and grasped as picture, and human beings transformed into subjectum, t.i., into the standard of everything existing. The technical clarity of the form and the message liked by the artist serves to provoke a doubt towards the "well-known" and to remind that the clearness about the world is not a consumer product that can be easily used. Miķelis Fišers purposefully uses the power of the art itself—it's being different from politics, philosophy, religion, science and esotericism, but trying to be in a conditional spatial point where the individual details of constructed fields lose their distinctions through their sharp edges. Striving to define its historical difference from art that was created before it, contemporary art has become careless in relation to the rest of the world. It’s starting to liken to everything else. Miķelis Fišers has taken this into consideration. He relies on and uses the distinctiveness of art as a point of departure of his conceptual work.
Artworks presented in the exhibition by Miķelis Fišers: “The Evil Message or the Last Sermon of Stringy Meatwinger”, “Sunrise at the Wastelands of Madness. Padites”, “The Abandoned Paradise” (all 2018, architecture by Roberta Fišere), Frottages of Polygonal Surfaces (2016), and “The Little Wailing Wall” (2018, sound together with ERROR). The full-length documentary by Mārtiņš Grauds ”Forging Condors” (2018) presented in the exhibition will help to lead to Miķelis Fišers art and personality.
Curator Inga Šteimane.
(1) Martin Heidegger. Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980. From: M. Heidegers. Malkasceļi. Rīga, Intelekts, 1998, 58.p., 71.p.