A failed experiment can be valuable to an artist or scientist.
Kronschläeger calls these “timeline works,” or “sources,” and
several can be found in his studio. One of these, about the size
of a small briefcase, is perched high at the edge of a loft storage
space. A rugged surface carved from blue industrial foam and
lined with silicone, it resembles a topographic map, though
instead of circular elevation lines, white caulk stripes run parallel
over its face. This piece proved the catalyst for Kronschläeger’s
refined “Repercussions” series, an exploration of hand-made
alterations to the modern picture plane. “Repercussions” was
exhibited at Winkleman Gallery in 2006 and, although some
critics then cited Agnes Martin and Frank Stella as
Kronschläeger’s antecedents, the topographical “source” work
reveals the true impetus of the series, and suggests that
Kronschläeger’s superficial irruptions - “crunching, pinching,
folding, crinkling” - are experiential, and more closely related
to the subtle spatial experiments of Ricci Albenda, the grand
gestures of Richard Serra or the architectural provocations of
Frank Gehry. The wall mounted “Repercussions” are handsome,
potent works that can be comprehended visually, but they are,
in essence, studies for the largest work in the series, a site-specific
wall installation that physically engages the viewer’s body.
Kronschläeger’s larger works more fully inform our
understanding of the exchange between sculpture and
architecture. Unsurprisingly, then, when I ask him what
direction, if any, he has planned for future manifestations of the
mesh project, he replies, “Architectural interventions, site-specific
Photos: Mathias Kessler, Arthur Nobre
works that create detours...we’ll see.” / Christopher Reiger
His work looks familiar in shape and expression to anyone who
follows the latest turns of the avant-garde of a highly expressive
architectural culture industry, from Frank Gehry to Peter
Eisenman to the folding forms of Hani Rashid and Lise Anne
Couture. The first impression may be to have entered the model
building studio of one of their architect peers - and while this is
not the case, the comparison is no coincidence.
Much of architecture’s formal experimentation over the past 40
years was fueled by the highly articulated break-away obsession
of one Peter Eisenman to overcome the notion of architecture
as an objectifiable object that can be read against the backdrop
of its surrounding as a defined entity of material certainty.
Eisenman has utilized many techniques to arrive at his formal
intent to blur perception and readability of his buildings, from
variations in scaling to indexing to coding.
A body of work that was featured as solo exhibition at Plus Ultra
Gallery in 2006 under the title “repercussions” is just this:
meticulously pin-striped pieces of paper crumbled and crunched
to various degrees and fixed in their three-dimensional state of
distortion. This seemingly simple approach is visually highly
effective, and if one takes the degree to which the advertising
industry “re-appropriates” art as a measure of success one will
find that the current advertising campaign of New York’s School
of Visual Art prominently features crumbled pin-striped paper
in subway stations all over town. However, the critical content
of this series of works and its affiliation with architectural subject
matter would not be fully described in the strangely
topographical results of physical force on paper. It has to be
noted that the objects are only partially crunched, and one side
typically remains in its squared, two-dimensional flatness we all
associate with a sheet of paper. It is this straight edged side that
grounds the work in the two-dimensionality of its material,
while the topography of the paper crunch defies this reading
as a flat object. In short: we don’t know if we are looking at a
picture or a sculpture, and it is this blurred perception of surface
and object that Kronschläeger’s work shares with contemporary
architecture where landscape surface and built object defy their
delineation. Kronschläeger in turn does the trick with art’s own
most generic medium: a piece of paper. / Matthias Neumann
31 / 96
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