“Allí no hay nada”

 

The Tyrolean Northern Mountain Chain towers highly above Innsbruck and is nearly tangible in sun-shine. The very same windows of the Galerie Bernd Kugler cannot escape such a panorama and complete the works of the young Argentinean artist, Gabriel Kondratiuk. Like the rocky massif, the large grey landscapes follow canvas upon canvas. The forms are voided of their edginess by a round brush stroke and vividly completed with spiral contours.

The paintings tell of the journey from Buenos Aires to Patagonia, the artist’s place of birth, El Bolsón. A quotation of Borges about Patagonia declares: “There is nothing there”, the artist’s inspiration for the title of the exhibition. The reduction of colourfulness does not attempt to illustrate the sadness of the landscape so as not to distract from the poetical tone and the landscape there reflected. This contemplative dealing with the experiential space of painting makes one understand why, in past years, he destroyed, rather than retained, his finished works. For, in their invisibility attributed by us, his landscapes, defined as non-spaces, own neither effigy nor history, but simply presence: it is this to which the artist and conceptualist, Gabriel Kondratiuk, insistently points, and which he desires to be experienced, rather than depicted, in his painting.

 

Karin Pernegger