Kasper Pincis "Perek"
I do try to manipulate feelings of familiarity that are connected with particular media - the humming fan, warm light of the slide projector, texture and smell of a paperback book- page (…)
Aanant & Zoo is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of British artist Kasper Pincis (*1982) in Germany.
Telling and narration are not specific to literature, but are ubiquitous modes in the world - of conceiving, structuring, interpreting knowledge, ideas and intentions. Using the potential shapes of narrative by avoiding pointing at a particular one, Kasper Pincis is interested in giving confidence to the potential viewer, so that he or she might be able to develop their own private narrative. The artist borrows the formal aspects and materials from the world of literature, academic lecture and bureaucracy. Among various authors that have deeply influenced the work and thinking of Kasper Pincis, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec, and the Aurora Australis edited by Ernest Shackleton are especially important references for this exhibition.
Pincis' materials and tools are newsprint, typewriter, carbon paper, photocopier, pencil, letraset and slides. For him, it is the form, the presence of the media itself, which already contains and indicates a possible content. Sometimes the image, the text design and title are enough to make you imagine and believe in the whole book inside.
To be typed rather than written: the idea of typing as a seperate medium in and of itself plays a key role in Pincis' work. The typing machine, generally seen as old fashioned - known and outdated - may be something understandable as it already refers to something. Standing in between a certain progression it was an important invention, but is no longer used. Recently the incorporation of pencil drawing to typewriter pieces has linked two of Kasper Pincis' streams of work. In Navajo Rug for instance, a typewriter grid gives rhythm and center to an image taken form an old North American textbook. The Navajos, a Native American Tribe, are represented through a tradable artifact. Although the tradesmen bargaining for the rug or just talking about its quality, are long gone. Through this construction the observer is approaching different layers of time. All moments and persons having passed, the image still evokes a strange, even uncanny wish to be part of that past.
Pincis uses the film presented in glorious screentone (5:11) as a context giving work, a catalyst for the other pieces to work through. It is made from still images scanned from a 1962 school textbook. The soundtrack is edited from old BBC vinyl records, which used to be produced for amateur dramatics and for people to make soundtracks to their home movies. The idea of progression is generated by the arrangement of the images and sounds, the various climates in the images are changing, the sound may build to a crescendo.
The shapes which Pincis uses most, are the cinematic or landscape forms. In Die Bergkatze, the shape is borrowed of a screen-mask from an Ernst Lubitsch film made in 1921. Die Bergkatze (The Wild Cat), is a comic romance and satire on military life. In the film, the mask is black, Pincis has made it white. A white shape around a white scene, a scene that removes Lubitsch´s Alpine world and replaces it with a white one - out of gesso, polished and smooth, mounted onto a large wooden board. The use of the balsa wood refers to the hobby of model-making. The domestic motif appears often used in discrepancy to the adventurous-male attitude; further the material undercuts the heaviness of the form and manages to convey the idea of mountains and snow. The material balsa wood is inspired by the Kon-Tiki-Expedition, undertaken in 1947 in order to prove the possible colonization of Polynesia from South America, led by Thor Heyerdahl. The Kon-Tiki raft was made from nine balsa wood logs and still embodies the lightweight and amateur combined with the adventurous and daring.
Kasper Pincis (*1982) lives and works in London. Pincis obtained BA Fine Art and History of Art from the Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2004 und graduated from the Royal Academy (PGdip Fine Art, Gold medal winner) in 2007.
