Marianne Zamecznik, 2006
Katalogtext opera austria, Frammenti di prospettive
You can sit on my head!
People, animals and strange hybrid creatures all seem to thrive in Katrin Plavcak’s company.
A leopard lives with an older couple in their bourgeois apartment.
The man kisses his pet gently on the forehead, ignoringhis wife`s less than loving glance across the dinner table. The menàge a trois is maybe a bit on the exotic side, but I want to believe in this kind of bliss. My dream as a kid was to keep a lion pet. But the moment of joy is only brief. Next, I see the big cat standing on its back feet, forhead pressed against the window, like a dog looking for it’s master. His tail is so sad it makes me want to cry.
Katrin’s funny stories hide from view a melancholy within them. She can capture you with her soft stroke and gentle color, but beware! Her eyes will hunt you down. In ”Stalaktit + Stalakmit” two coneshaped weird guys look straight at you. Don’t mind that one of them is up side down. He’s just showing off. The crowd in the background is already tired of his tricks and on their way home.
In “zentrales sehen” the insignificant is mixed with the mysterious and unexplainable. A road worker, his head cut off by the snapshot, is doing his thing, when a black ghost cloud, with grey something around it takes off and floats in mid-air. The orange cones don`t seem to care. It’s only another day at work. If a great abstract figure appears on a perfectly figurative image, we tend to think that this object is obstructing parts of the image, that a part of the image is ”hidden” behind the object or field and thus ”covering” it. But this is not necessarily the case. It’s maybe all one and the same layer.
When we went to the Devandra Banhart concert at Webster hall, I had a guy in front of me with a really big afro hair. I could not see any of the show on stage. Helpful as ever, Katrin offered “You can sit on my head!”.
Many of her motifs deal with the problem of seeing. In ”Verstellter Blick” a girl holds a badminton racket in front of her, the grid of it blending into the facial features. All but the deep black background are joyfully candy striped, flat as a pancake. She makes it all look effortless though, those precise manuevers. How she does it is a mystery to me. Her images offer valuable escape routes, using memory, humor and narrative to trick my brain. That’s why I like to look at them.
Talking about Gelatin, Katrin said something I cannot forget,:
”Every time I see their work I go ”Whoa! Fuck - I’m such a boring artists!” You wish girl.