When the horizon starts crumbling

It´s those massive concrete blocks – hanging on the wall like canvasses, painted with photorealistic skies –that catch one´s eye when entering Adam de Neige´s exhibition. The blue is based on real lapis lazuli, a semiprecious stone, long-since reserved for the powerful and indeed of rare beauty and pureness.

How the layers of those blocks, and with it the painted sky, break open – vast parts even having crumbled down already and given space to the reinforcement grid underneath – seams like a critical comment on the current political situation in Europe. Paradoxically, the contrast of sky, symbol of wide spaces, and concrete with all its gravity, its delimiting and segregating character, is enhanced by the destruction of its beautiful surface. Freedom, a faint hope on the horizon –in our society constantly claiming to defend it, it hardly comes real for the less privileged.

In this context, De Neige´s attempt of creating a virtual thus worldwide access to the exhibition becomes particularly intriguing. However moving the artworks may be when directly present, adapting the presentation mode to the 21st century is worth a try.

Finally, a straight political statement is to be found in the exhibition´s center: a compact stack of “Mediterranean Sea Salt“ dispensers, creating the image of a plastic boat at sea.

Here, art isn´t only formally well-made. It also becomes a mirror of society.

– Wolfgang Pichler, Artmagazine.cc, 06.06.2016

Original article in German: http://artmagazine.cc/content94023.html