COMME des CROISSANTS* — GILLMEIER RECH

13 June 2014 - 19 July 2014

Leon Eisermann
COMME des CROISSANTS*

Gillmeier Rech is pleased to present Leon Eisermann’s first solo exhibition COMME des CROISSANTS*. In an investigation of the symbolic language of economy and artistic enterprise, four distinct series of works confront one another, posing questions to notions of intrinsic value and problems of permanence.

Each of these series is constructed to evade easy categorization — what becomes more apparent is how aesthetics regulate our perceptions of quality and worth. From the transitory and traceable spaces of the studio, the mailroom, and the shop, sculptures, photographs, and paintings are presented in the gallery as paradoxical forms; Each swapping their normative roles with each other. Here, no work is of a single-origin. Nothing is entirely pure.

Five ‘photographs’, seemingly reversed, expose the date and subject matter of unavailable images. Instead, they operate as text-based paintings. Creating an afterimage only by way of a suggestion, our persistence of vision is denied. Either way, these are images we know. Between them, tiered sculptures are photographic metaphors, standing with a more romantic idealism than their hanging counterparts. Ceramics operate as apertures, each holding a semblance of still life: web-bought roses in RGB colors.
These cut flowers, perishable dead things, connotatively rare and yet mass-produced, recall at once all the clichés of occasion – cheap emotional cues.

A set of ten mixed media paintings on stretched vinyl, repetitively play off themselves against the back walls. Unpainted and deskilled, they reject value placed upon the archival quality of a work, as their surfaces are impermanent and easily effaceable (a mixture of turpentine and water renders the vinyl canvas entirely clean again).

Throughout the exhibition, filtered coffee and fresh croissants will be available: ubiquitous items of daily routine, affordable, fast, and easy to consume. “Artist edition” styrofoam cups, ordered and imported, are signed, numbered, dispersed and decontextualized, then maybe lost and found. In line with the series of vinyl paintings and textual photographs, their production is rapid and simple, but in this case it has been outsourced.

The gallery functions as a midpoint venue between production and consumption. Everyone is gathered around the water cooler, hands are being shaken and names are being exchanged. We’re working in the same usual modes. The room smells fresh.

by Kate Brown

Supported by Tres Cabezas