Liesl Raff / MAXIMAL SOFT
18 January - 10 March 2018
Sophie Tappeiner
An der Hülben 3,
1010 Vienna, Austria
Max L. Feldman
18 January - 10 March 2018
Sophie Tappeiner
An der Hülben 3,
1010 Vienna, Austria
Photo credit : Peter Mochi
Images courtesy of the artist and Sophie Tappeiner
In
MAXIMAL
SOFT,
this subtle reflection on how and why certain materials work
together, Liesl Raff asks how different materials can be ‘friends’
with each other.
How
can these odd couples, she asks, complement and improve each other?
Not merely by analogy, these materials become ‘friends’ through
material connections and arrangements, forging an ineradicable bond
from an unexpected association.
Raff
makes steel weep, and latex interstices, representing the most
personal experiences – recognition between strangers, skin on skin,
tears at the dinner table – turning industrial materials into
things with emotional lives of their own.
On
closer inspection, these objects bear the unique trace of human
touch. Raff’s fingerprints leave calloused textures and rippled
surfaces, just as friendship leaves its traces on the human soul,
even when old acquaintances have been separated by time and place.
Raff’s materials – entangled, embracing – show that people may
move away or grow apart, but can never truly separate because there
is always some remainder, some trace of that former union.
Our
only choice is to open ourselves to a shared experience, thinking
inter-material sociability as an index of human relationships. Only
interacting with someone like us but different from us, in a shared
space without idealisations, without forcibly reducing them to our
wants, opens the possibility of true friendship.
Max L. Feldman