Transgression – The Power of Staging
Jürgen Schilling

Her ingenuity leads Franziska Maderthaner down new paths. For years, she dealt with the avant-gardes of the last century and of the present in an innovative as well as ironic, playful and critical way. She placed the likeness of the protagonists of those avant-garde works in her tableaus or else she paraphrased or cited directly their works. Now, she empowers herself in her current series of works by using a language of forms from an even earlier epoch. Decisive for Maderthaner’s decision to deploy her unique stylistic and technical finesse in terms of the painting of that time is not the obvious topicality of the Baroque for contemporary art, in which context in the meantime even the works of a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst or Maurizio Cattalan are being considered, rather, it is the emotional and simultaneously precisely calculated pictorial language of Baroque art that corresponds to her personal style, characterized by an exuberant desire to spin imaginative tales, an intricate way of combining things, a questioning of representational practices and a love of nuances. Also the Baroque artist’s fondness for myths and allegories as well as voluptuous tumescent corporeality and naturalistic details may have influenced her decision to give her paintings this new form of expression. Franziska Maderthaner, in her large-format canvases, joins things which do not appear to belong together to form cohesive compositions full of surprising contents and striking visual effects.

Through her method of fusing abstract and hyper-realistic painted sections, she creates the impression of an ambiguous illusion of space. Puddles of paint poured on the canvas softly stream down forming wads of colorful plumes or thicken in the flow to evoke – apart from the visual pleasure – a mysterious atmosphere within the representation, conveying the semblance of faces seen in dreams. On the one hand, they enclose and connect the groups of figures, on the other this rampant fogs thwart the narrative plausibility. A final coat of varnish covers material differences between sophisticated oil painting and the parts of the pictures covered in lacquer, thereby producing a homogeneous surface. The figures and staffage which Franziska Maderthaner places in the paintings (after she has found their archetype in her stockpile of photos, reproductions in glossy magazines or filtered out of the Internet and drawn and manipulated according to her conceived notions, in a complex process on the computer) are all meshed in a hard-to-see-through tangle of activity. An abundance of masterfully interlaced pieces of partial information add up to a multi-layered unity, whose causal correlations to be felt rather than rationally comprehended. Because the actions of each of these figures is so unambiguously defined, the recipient tries inevitably, but in vain, to construct a direct logical reference between the individual representational sections of the painting; only to quickly realize that they are dealing with visualized fragments of Franziska Maderthaner’s distinct world of ideas whose interpretation must remain a subjective one. Their appeal is based, not least of all, in the enigma of the coolly distanced rendering.

The titles of her work, which could make the scenes easier to interpret, only serve to evoke more questions. They often originate from pop songs – from the Beatles, Leonhard Cohen or David Bowie – and impart unique image-accompanied messages, which beg to be decoded immediately and placed consequentially into the system of mystifications. The origin of the themes and motifs for the series of paintings entitled “Transgression” is found in the personal experience of everyday moments, but primarily in the course of deliberate research in art history publications or museum visits. Franziska Maderthaner not only incorporates established pain-ting innovations of the Old Masters and develops an idiosyncratic approach to these sources, but what is essential to her work is her interest in diverse Old Master techniques concerning the use of light, as well as their fundamental ideas on the use of space. Inspired by the works of Caravaggio and his successors, she heightens the plasticity of their figures and also sharpens the perception for the properties of certain materials – for example, sheeting stretched tightly across silage or plastic helmets. It is like a kind of spotlight focused on its protagonists, an “indi-cator light”, which makes a side view of an upper torso, immersed in fervent meditation, appear tangible to the touch, or lets the bodies of two people in the foreground of the painting “Transgression II” seemingly step out of the canvas square. A pointed interplay between darkened and blazing bright sections gives a structure to these paintings. Oversized illuminated toadstools of the fly agaric variety on a shadowy ground, presented from two points of view in 5 original composition and leaves the main characters in their places – next to Juno is Iris the messenger of the gods, who plucks a hundred eyes out of the head of the watchman in order to hand them to Juno, who throws them into the feathers of peacocks – but in her hand Iris in now holding a crumpled paper handkerchief instead of the cut-off head, and Juno’s face is superimposed by a yellowish pool of color. At the bottom of the painting, huddled over the crooked naked torso of Argus, is a group of youngsters embracing, piled up either in some kind of scuffle or enthused over some athletic success – the footwear and clothing would suggest this.. Their enthusiasm overrides the horror of the act of violence, into which the painter has ensnared them and which they do not seem to perceive. As in other pictures in this series of paintings, paradoxical relationships are constructed and the fictional event provides Franziska Maderthaner with the opportunity to brilliantly describe in paint the fascination of various materials like taffeta, synthetics and wool. She defines the plasticity of the figures through the folds of the fabric and artifical lights, expertly playing out the effect of a distorted perspective. Clearly, furthermore, which influence on the course of action in the painting of the dramatic interwoven trickling of monochrome-white as a corner-boundary and a heavily symbolic blood red splash of color on the clothes of Juno must be gauged. Similar characteristics are brought together in a selfportrait, which shows Franziska Maderthaner in three phases of motion . Between swelling streaks of color she appears in the painting – dressed in a belted robe made of canvas– in a room without structure as the personification of painting, and demonstrates, underlined by lofty gestures and expressive mimicry: awakening, triumph and expiration. In a clear triangular composition the bodies, lit up by sharp-edged bundled rays, are embedded in a continuum of light and shadow zones, within which the formation of carefully draped material creates its own abstract domains. Again, aspects of content and form refer to stylistic devices of the Baroque period – and to Symbolism, which, in its own fastidious way of perceiving reality, makes homage, up until Surrealism. one and the same work, grow through such a picturesque treatment to opulent monumentality.

The fact that one view of them is upside down can be understood as an indication of their hallucinogenic effect. This self-assured appearance of the toadstools in their ornamental configuration is no less spectacular than some of the gesturing figures, who not only lend a dramatic flair, but also accentuate the lines of construction on which the whole composition is based. Franziska Maderthaner’s painting freezes the emotional sign language of her characters – also an achievement of the 16th century; the painters at the time introduced into art, in addition to the sober view of reality, also characteristic moods of that epoch like sensuality, ecstatic rapture and self-centered peace. Her paintings depict scenery extracted from the flow of time, fixing the gaze on the moment, holding it still, which we assume the lens of a camera (Maderthaner often slips in the photography motif) – if it were presented with such complex subjects – could capture better than the painter with her oil colors. The meticulous description of the being-as-it-is of the depicted in these paintings stems from her exactness of focusing on the details, almost to the point of creating optical illusions, and on intensely bright lighting. At the same time the picture’s dramaturgy constantly raises doubt about the obviousness of the painted sequences. Franziska Maderthaner takes to heart Alex Colvilles’ dictum that a good realist has to invent everything, not least when she use samples from art history and shifts them into new kinds of contemporary contexts, without highly stylized or formal values. At an angular view from the bottom – as if seen in the Loggia dei Lanzi – she portrays Giambologna’s marble sculpture “The Rape of a Sabine Woman”, very realistically.

Yet the artist relativizes the mythical background by letting the Sabine woman, her body spiraling in the arms of a Roman hero, twist to reach a pile of plastic helmets, a brightly colored heap, which stands in heavy opposition to the erotically-laden abduction scene portrayed in grisaille. Reaching for the helmets, which were carried by the artist to her residence to be photographed there, could represent a fantasy, but it could also represent the decisive grasp for the Biblical apple, that stays hidden, through an abstract green color space, in an implied tree. Franziska Maderthaner transforms fundamental legends in her paraphrase of Rubens painting “Juno and Argus.” She retains the original composition and leaves the main characters in their places – next to Juno is Iris the messenger of the gods, who plucks a hundred eyes out of the head of the watchman in order to hand them to Juno, who throws them into the feathers of peacocks – but in her hand Iris in now holding a crumpled paper handkerchief instead of the cut-off head, and Juno’s face is superimposed by a yellowish pool of color. At the bottom of the painting, huddled over the crooked naked torso of Argus, is a group of youngsters embracing, piled up either in some kind of scuffle or enthused over some athletic success – the footwear and clothing would suggest this.. Their enthusiasm overrides the horror of the act of violence, into which the painter has ensnared them and which they do not seem to perceive. As in other pictures in this series of paintings, paradoxical relationships are constructed and the fictional event provides Franziska Maderthaner with the opportunity to brilliantly describe in paint the fascination of various materials like taffeta, synthetics and wool. She defines the plasticity of the figures through the folds of the fabric and artifical lights, expertly playing out the effect of a distorted perspective. Clearly, furthermore, which influence on the course of action in the painting of the dramatic interwoven trickling of monochrome-white as a corner-boundary and a heavily symbolic blood red splash of color on the clothes of Juno must be gauged. Similar characteristics are brought together in a selfportrait, which shows Franziska Maderthaner in three phases of motion . Between swelling streaks of color she appears in the painting – dressed in a belted robe made of canvas– in a room without structure as the personification of painting, and demonstrates, underlined by lofty gestures and expressive mimicry: awakening, triumph and expiration. In a clear triangular composition the bodies, lit up by sharp-edged bundled rays, are embedded in a continuum of light and shadow zones, within which the formation of carefully draped material creates its own abstract domains. Again, aspects of content and form refer to stylistic devices of the Baroque period – and to Symbolism, which, in its own fastidious way of perceiving reality, makes homage, up until Surrealism.

Übersetzung: Ida Cerne, Renée Gadsden