Goodbye Mauritius
Much has already been thought and written about the
head and portrait form of the well-known Black Square,
first realised in 1915. The total detachment from the object and
from the phenomena of nature exists only as an assertion, as an
intellectual game - but not as something manufactured, and certainly
not in the form of a work of art that "is about a truth of
non-objective being beneath the surface of phenomena" - at
least, this is how Kasimir Malevich once put it, who gave a counterpart
of the Black Square the following title: Red Square.
Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions.
The "non-objective being beneath the surface of phenomena", or rather
the motivic and metaphoric connection that almost inevitably arises
through the reductive forming of concrete natural and other phenomena,
is the artistic-ideological field to which Frank Maier's painting,
in which densely constructed, finely chiselled orders of lines and
shapes prevail, also belongs.
In the paintings, which at first glance appear abstract, the artist
uses complexes of forms that refer specifically to reality - for
example, to the physical characteristics of a marine animal, a crab
(see: Crab,
or Black
Hole Crab Sun). It is recognizable by its triangularly
tapering defence implements and its characteristically carapaced
body - and at the same time evokes various associations. These include
the aspect of defensiveness and of being armed, which can be understood
in a positive sense as being sovereign or autonomous because this
is how the species from primeval times ensures its survival. In
addition, there are other themes related to the crab, such as the
connotations “not succeeding in” or "spoiling" something,
as well as the ability of the animal to move sideways and backwards
if the given circumstances should not allow it to go straight ahead.
A complex matter is also the web of meaning that pervades Frank
Maier's painting Lullaby,
where severed claws and other fragments of crab bodies seem to have
been stranded in an Yves Tanguy-like, fantastic wasteland. The potential
for destruction and loss expressed in the well-known lullaby Schlaf,
Kindlein, schlaf is hinted at - if not even illustrated - in
the picture with a seemingly spilled red tone, whose amorphous surface
formation stands in sharp contrast to the circular forms also present
in the pictorial space.
These circular forms look like multicoloured ball-bearings, compactly
and autonomously present in Frank Maier's pictorial spaces (e.g.
in Sparkling)
or searching for new places there. Their actual form, consisting
of staggered singular elements, is a "re-pupating" of
the ribbon-like frames that in many of the artist's works accumulate
at the edges of the picture and are often continued in material
terms beyond the pictorial space by one or more frame strips - fanned-out
boundaries, by which the picture asserts itself as separate from
its surroundings.
New in Frank Maier's iconography is the impression of cosmic landscapes,
for example in the painting escape,
in whose pictorial realm a supposedly rotating, technoidly iridescent
circular form mutates Franz Radziwill-like into a more or less known
flying object, which either threatens the world humans live in or
promises a monad-like shelter in view of the desolate situation
on earth.
Text: Thomas Groetz / Translation: Frank
Geber
FRANK MAIER