“THE DAIMONS exhibition seeks to explore an aspect of art-making that appears almost naturally in the artists presented: an impulse towards figuration that does not aim at the representation of something, but constitutes the medium, or the phenomenological vector-to use Rosalind Krauss’s redefinition-with which the gesture confronts the medium. This impulse or body event, which eludes the spotlight of spectacular mainstream criticism, is nevertheless something that not only constitutes evidence of the present, but at the same time refers to something fundamental that concerns art in its germinal moment, that gives action its character of indeterminacy, and that reverberates in the art of all times. In this sense, it could even lead us to reflect on the present as an epoch that preserves certain characteristics of a neo-primitivism. Through an unfinished figuration that is self-extinguishing in the result, which is essentially the creation of a space of movement, the artist’s action regains its fundamental relationship with the support, while the work regains the irreducible ambiguity of being both relief and surface. The work of art is thus a plastic device that finds its key in a certain “thickness”, in a space between the support and the virtual surface with which the viewer comes into contact and through which the work of art begins to exercise its agency over the viewer. In this thickness (internal) or relief (external) created by the figuration in its self-extinction, the work preserves what Alessio Fransoni, in his “Political Theory of Art”, calls the “daimonic difference”, a difference between seeing and being seen, and the very condition for the exercise of freedom of action.”

Ilari Valbonesi.”

 

 

“DAIMONS

AMIKO KAMIKAZE • HAI HOGO • ANNALISA MACAGNINO GEORGIJ MELNIKOV • NIKOLA MILOJCEVIC • SERGE PAYET LUIGI PUXEDDU • GERT RESINGER • ALEXANDER STRITZELBERGER ARMIN SCHRÖTTER • MARTINA VANDA • MICHAEL VONBANK

 

Exhibition curated by Ilari Valbonesi

MAY 31. – JUNE 14. 2025

Masc Foundation: Grundsteingasse 40

Kunsttankstelle Ottakring: Grundsteingasse 45

Pillars of Memory: Piazza am Yppenplatz 1160 Wien

Vernissage: Saturday, May 31. 2025 6-11pm

Opening hours: Tue-Sat 5-8pm

Finissage: Saturday, June 14. 2025 at 7pm

www.masc.at | www.kunsttankstelleottakring.at | www.collectiondichter.com“