The Austrian artist Manuel Gorkiewicz creates an illusionary course in the quarters of the gallery Mezzanin. The series of new works and the primarily non-artistic materials used for it, encounter a refinement in the art context, intended by Gorkiewicz. It exceeds the everyday aesthetic and approaches the borders of economic rationality. The objects omit contradicting emotions and associations because they suggest a glossiness and enchantment on one hand while on the other inheriting the foreboding of a threatening collapse of the production.

These desire inspiring and illusionary moments of artistic magic prove to be a vital strategic category of aesthetic practice, both in critique and appropriation.Additionally it unfolds the inner inconsistency and plurality of the relationship between art and perception on the background of the artistic reflections on the fragile correlation between the aesthetic and the economic.

The divergent color studies by Harald Küppers, Johannes Itten, Erwald Hering and Phillip Otto Runge are starting points for Gorkiewiczs mimetic procedure in the case of the shown wall pieces and sculptures. Through the artistically physical confrontation with the limitations of the colour spectrum of normal cooking chocolate, the pieces do accredit Kippenbergers former imperative “put your eye in your mouth”. And yet, in their super ordinate legality, they do humorously emphasize the role of the eye as an edacious organ in a perverted form. Once you are able to take your eye of the so familiar things, the productive moment and the pre-arranged goal of this inversion seem to have become invisible in their original intention and specific aesthetic communication. There is a fundamental position infused in the exhibition that “only” works in the original aesthetic settlement and visual effects. Whether through over-staging or deception, Gorkiewicz acts on the edge of an authorship in service of a constant re-ascertainment of the originality principle and in the knowledge of artistic production as a special form of goods production.

Christian Egger