NO28 Das Liegende zeitigt sich im Gestell als Gesetztes

Thomas Hartmann
Goldstein Galerie, Frankfurt am Main

18 January – 24 February 2018

From artificial wooden path to thinking hollow form

Thomas Hartmann is building an installation in the Goldstein Galerie.

The remarks on corrugated cardboard bodies and their installation, on the interplay between the two, remain questions, even if they speak in the form of assertions. They are limited to the space. The disparate modules embody something, do they embody the space?
The cardboard installation embodies the “But how, if…?” It makes a tentative claim. The resulting installation corresponds only partially to the technical and scientific conquest of space. Rather, it refers to the poetic space and here to the architecture of the allotment garden. The allotment garden is one of those primordial phenomena which, according to a word of Goethe, makes people feel a kind of shyness or even fear. For behind the allotment garden, so it would seem, there is nothing more to which it can be traced back. In front of it there is no turning back to other things. What is peculiar to the allotment garden must show itself from within. Is it still possible to say what is peculiar about it? As long as we do not experience this, its meaning in the installation remains dark. The way in which the allotment garden manages the work of art hangs in the indeterminate for the time being. If one derives the word “space” from “clearing”, i.e. clearing, clearing the wilderness, then it is beyond the installation. In the allotment garden itself, a consistent use of the plastic structure is revealed. He, who lets the plastic structure temporarily become an object of parasitic occupation, is a descendant of the one technical-physical space. Once it is conceded that the work of the Rosist is the working of beauty, must not then its true nature, that which reveals its own essence, become decisive in the plastic structure? The interplay between art and allotment garden would have to be considered from the experience of place and region. The space, within which it can be found like an existing object, nevertheless provides the free, the open space for human settlement and living. Here, the corrugated cardboard volumes would be the embodiment of places which, by opening up an area and keeping it safe, keep a free space within themselves, which allows the respective things to linger and the human being to live in the midst of things.

Thomas Hartmann, 2017