ART CITIES:Vienna-Ernst Caramelle,Part I

Since more than 40 years, Ernst Caramelle is questioning reality and illusion in the context of art in various media such as painting, wall painting, drawing, photography and video. The conceptually justified work deals with aspects such as the production, reproduction and perception of art and its reception. In colored, usually geometrical forms and with duplications, reflections and varied repetitions, Caramelle’s painting describes spatial perspectives broken by different perspectives (Part II).

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Mumoc Archive

Titled “A Résumé”, the retrospective at mumok covers all of the Ernst Caramelle’s work phases from 1974 to today. As early as 1976, Caramelle already used the term “Resümee” as the title of his multimedia thesis at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, which consisted of a cardboard box containing 23 drawings and collages, 12 photographs, a Super 8 film, an audiotape, and an object, thereby assembling nearly all the media and techniques the artist still uses today. The exhibition picks up on the self-assured, ironic approach that Ernst Caramelle already demonstrated at the start of his career. It thus shows his work “Resümee” in a reversed loop at the end of the exhibition circuit, which interweaves media and conceptual processes to enable viewers to trace the many connections between the works and work groups. The cross-references reveal the artist’s complex musings and deliberations while unfolding all the diversity of his fecund pictorial inventions. In addition to the around 350 works spanning four decades on view in the retrospective, Ernst Caramelle is also produced two new site-specific wall paintings for mumok whose methods and themes tie in with the spatial concept for the exhibition and with his oeuvre as a whole painting. From the very beginning, Caramelle has methodically incorporated in his work deeper meanings, irony, the paradoxical, and a meticulous examination of the conditions determining our perception. He thus produced in the 1970s, during a research fellowship at MIT (Cambridge, MA), his first video works and the installation “Video-Ping-Pong” (1974), in which he ontologically investigates the transformation of reality and its perception through new technologies. In the early 1980s, Ernst Caramelle began to further expand his semiotic and media vocabulary. The fast and ingenious drawings were now joined by paintings, whereby the artist once again subverted conventions by painting mostly on walls, or using wood or cardboard rather than canvas. In his “Gesso Pieces”, he uses the classic chalk ground as his painting surface, which he paints alternately with watercolor, ink, or acrylic. As he switches between wall painting and panel painting, the parameters of painting are also defined differently: the picture space is conceived as unlimited and resembles an optical illusion alternating between two- and three-dimensionality. Later, he began painting watercolors as well, which follow similar principles as the “Gesso Pieces” but are in some cases more narrative. The surfaces of the pictures are like experimental set-ups for investigating the essence of exhibiting, of art and art production. Abstraction and emblematic figuration as well as floral formlessness interact here constantly as in the drawings – as a kind of testing, critical, boundlessly anarchic attitude. Caramelle also created his first “Sun Pieces” in the early 1980s. These make do entirely without the gestural handwriting of the artist, and he poetically describes their materials as “sun on paper”. To produce them, the artist makes stencils and layers them on colored paper, after which he exposes the piece to direct sunlight for months or even years. This results in works made solely from fading color and passing time. Posters, postcards, and artist’s books, which Ernst Caramelle has always designed for his exhibitions since the 1970s, are also an integral part of his artistic practice, as are media interventions and the editing of media images in his screen prints.

Info: Curator: Sabine Folie, mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Duration: 30/11/18-28/4/19, Days & Hours: Mon 14:00-19:00, Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-19:00, Thu 10:00-21:00. www.mumok.at