Philip Grözinger’s paintings show sinister worlds awash with bright color. His pictorial universe is often set in a post-apocalyptic atmosphere populated by hybrid creatures and loaded with artefacts of an erstwhile civilization. For ALAC we show a body of new works in which Grözinger continues exploring his dystopian scapes. Grözinger realizes these paintings in an abstract narrative, always true to the material qualities of the painting, working in bright colors, pastos-stalked oil, pastel crayons, and spray paint on canvas. On occasion the paint is laid on impasto and finger-thick, then either spread out carefully anew or scraped away. At times, the various surface structures produced in this manner allow the paint itself to become another alien object and an intrinsic part of the image.
For the series of works, that Jacob Jessen is showing at ALAC, he has involved the Japanese glass company ’Nippon Electric Glass’, a major producer of glass substrate, the main component of LCD and touch screens. In this series, Jessen is redirecting the glass substrate from a commercial production to be exposed to an artistic analogue process of coating, transforming the transparency of the glass, its main function, with colored peel off lacquer used for coating cars. In this way Jessen has specifically worked with the materials and technologies that frame and form the passages to the digital world. Through this last physical threshold to virtual reality, Jessen seeks to create a physically oriented experience of our virtual schizoid reality, by ’re-directing’ the elements from their intended technological functionality to a kind of new material quality.
These different body of works complement each other well, as the two artists share a concept of humanity and schizoid reality, and aesthetically Jessen’s small monochromatic works punctuate Grözinger’s paintings in their shared colorful and painterly qualities and expressions.