Luc Hoekx / Arjan Janssen / Andrea Maria Krenn

"About Space"

Opening: Thursday, January 12th 2012, 7pm
Duration: January 13th –¬ February 18th 2012

Opening Remarks: Hartwig Knack, art historian, curator and author

Belgian artist Luc Hoekx’ concept has been obvious and clear from the beginning. There are references to architecture and space. You can feel the presence of design and scale models, views from above and from the front. You definitely experience space.
He doesn’t need a specific reason or subject to start a new work. The creative process is an intuitive one. Hoekx obviously feels challenged by colour and type of paint, the kind of basis he paints on and even the type of brushes he uses. These are components he examines like an alchemist and that help him cross bounds. The only limit there is for him is painting, abstract painting.
Hoekx’ work testifies of a persistent passion, of a pursuit of a personal solution. And in this case, the solution is of a modernistic nature.

Dutch artist Arjan Janssen’s drawings don’t cautiosly work their way from the paper’s brightness to a dense darkness. The artist covers the paper with a forceful dash of Siberian chalk along his t-square from the first stroke on.
Even if the stern geometric forms build up firm compositions, the process of their creation always remains visible. Through overlays of chalk strokes, lively, deep-black tones, reserved grayscales, and, where the paper is left blank or slightly modified with traces of the creative process, pure white patches are built up.
Beginning with the line, the artist works his way to complex planes and tonal graduations, which gives the drawings a painterly quality.

The oeuvre of Andrea Maria Krenn, a young artist based in Austria, always leads back to the basic principles of space and painting. The essential media of her practice are space-oriented pieces as well as painting. Even though you won’t find classic panel-paintings among her works, painting itself plays an important role. Her work moves along the line between two- and three-dimensionality, within her paintings, not only visual spaces open up, but the whole picture carrier including the image is understood as an object within a space.
Andrea Maria Krenn’s practice is most convincing where she opens up the mysterious condition of our world within a transitory in-between state of space and painting. Her explorations of space follow the conceptual purpose of finding places between image and reality through an open concept environment of painting.

(Excerpts: Frans van Roy (Hoekx), Tiziano Mazzelli (Janssen), Martin Hochleitner (Krenn))