June 7 - 12 July, 2018
KORE Contemporary
Personalhaus West 2.
Obergeschoss Morillonstrasse
773007 Bern
For the exhibition 'Three Three Three’ Patric Sandri created three correlating series of works installed in three nearly equal consecutive gallery spaces. Sandri’s gracefully constructed pieces move between the modes of sculpture, painting, and installation. Each room shows a different interpretation of the artists approach with the medium of painting. Sandri’s works are components that, when walking through the gallery spaces, illustrate the conditions of their coexistence that relate to each other in terms of interpretations of compositions and color-systems.
The viewer conducts a visual-mental re-construction of the separate works as they navigate the three gallery spaces. The artist utilizes wood, paint, canvas and cloth as his tools, along with the shifting, external elements of space and light. And so Sandri’s interventions are generated from his hand as well as his surroundings. The colors red, blue and yellow are a constant. These hues both artificially simulate light and rely on ambient light to fully demonstrate the extent of their intensity. Because the pieces are raised off of the wall, the works cast ephemeral shadows that mimic the various colors’ soft glow. Patric Sandri’s paintings are content and medium at the same time. The artist proposes a detachment from the rigor and age-long practice of painting in the form of panel painting that has been executed for centuries. Shouldn’t the architecture of painting be questioned once more and revised in terms of implementing its media content more precisely? Traditionally the viewer is confronted with a plane, mainly one surface, suggesting a pictorial space which is attached to an object. The perception of this pictorial space results through detachment from actuality similar to a view out of the window.
In this sense a painting presents itself in the exhibition room like an island in the ocean. Maybe the painting is able to create references within this space, but simultaneously it is trapped in an ongoing conflict between plane, object and space. To lend honesty to the pictorial space and open the painterly window to the viewer, Sandri proposes a transformation of the pictorial tools as the actual space and environment. What is important is the perception of the site-specific image that should be viewed as a painting and not only as a collection of objects within the three-dimensional space. Rather, the scene in the actual room should be perceived as an image with depth and volume. The image shall be experienced through a heightened intensity by the participant, movement within the space becomes a tool for painting whereby the image and perspective constantly change. Similar to a stage, the space or environment now serves as an image-carrier, the composition as the plane, the matter as bodies, the light as a source.
The pictorial space as actual space can visualize the paintings components by giving immediacy and authenticity without losing its materiality and visual message. With the participant involved, the perception within the painting becomes essential, connected directly with the reality of human experience.