PRESS RELEASE
David Keating. Passage
Dates: 3 November 2012 – 21 December 2012
Pfingstweidstrasse 23 / Welti-Furrer Areal, 8005 Zürich
Opening reception: 2 November 2012, 5 – 8 pm
In Passage, David Keating’s second solo exhibition with RaebervonStenglin, the sculptural object becomes linear, re-imagined as three-dimensional drawings. Space is continuous within and beyond these sculptures, framed by the gallery walls and becoming a part of the works, so that the viewer physically inhabits their compositions, entering into their dramas.
Keating is fascinated by materiality and the relationships that this can give rise to. Earlier works draped cut-up carpet around steel armatures. In Passage, the sculptures are stripped to the most minimal of forms — rope suspended from steel frames — yet in spite of their slender physicality they convey a bodily presence, rendering the contrasts between hard and soft, upright and falling as inherently disquieting. Organic meets with geometric in these works, Apollonian with Dionysian. The lengths of rope have partly been painted and subtly change hue along their lengths. Seen through the steel rectangles, their fluid lines are painterly compositions in space and reference the histories of both painting and sculpture; their use of gravity as a compositional device recalling colour field painting, drip technique or the fragile, process-based sculptures of Eva Hesse.
Keating’s skein of ropes hint at chaos, whilst their right-angled metal frames assert order. Yet logic is adjusted in these sculptures, which reconfigure recognisable objects to create abstract scenarios and which are simultaneously sculpture and painting. Whilst the steel frames initially resemble vitrines — indeed the sculpture occupying the front gallery is reconfigured from one — they lack their referents’ impartiality and reason. Instead their forms are enigmatic and duplicitous, suggesting an invisible architecture of doorways and pathways that fail to properly function. Passages become too narrow to pass through, their structural propositions being both impeded and finished by the rope, and there seems to be a transferral of properties between these two quite different materials. Keating is interested in how little is needed in a work — how much can be apprehended in the mind, and how an artwork might transcend its physical limits. His sculptures question the distinction between surface and reality, finding presence as much in the space in between materials as within the objects themselves, and depicting the nature of the world as infinitely particular.
