FR/LESH

Mathias Kloser has been living in Malawi for years, though he was originally born in Zambia to Vorarlberg parents. During his studies in fine arts in Vienna (Gunter Damisch, 2004-2009), he primarily engaged with painting but always also worked in other media – printmaking, video and sculpture being further aesthetic lines – as evidenced by the award of first place of the Koschatzky Prize (2009).

Kloser's painterly focus lies in the figurative depiction of everyday scenes – though his Malawian everyday life already differs fundamentally from ours in purely infrastructural terms: low-speed internet, power outages, the nearest shopping opportunity in Mzuzu, a city 120km away. The otherness of the everyday he processes can appear escapist from a Central European perspective: jungle, waves, wooden huts, water troughs, dirt roads. This attribution can be underlined by the frequently consciousness-expanding quality of his paint application. With the right background knowledge, however, one can recognise the geographical trail running through the depicted scenes, leading through Portugal, Brazil or Austria as well.

If Kloser's use of colour and form thus risks an escapist reading, it does so on the basis of a long-developed self-understanding of someone who lives between clear geographical locations. Of someone whose socialisation quite naturally unites the most contrasting life realities. His both serious and relaxed approach testifies to this: problems always exist primarily to be solved, to be winked at – likewise on the canvas. And so his works can affect us: as visual expansions. For all the artistic distance, it seems coherent that Kloser was artistically socialised under Gunter Damisch. He purposefully develops colour universes capable of showing the greatest in the smallest, and the smallest in the greatest. Works whose repeating fractal quality dominates any depiction without ultimately conveying dominance in the completed canvas. These are works that silently show, point out.

In the new works, there is a recurring juxtaposition of explicitly sexual depictions with partially kitsch scenes of couples in love, through which an exploration of pornographic corporeality with emotional, spiritual connections takes place. More generally viewed, however, the works negotiate the bandwidth of human togetherness: people working, latently voyeuristically observing, in shared spaces, as loners.

Ultimately, it is the details of his painting manner that breathe life into the images – when he amplifies or subdues the most diverse details through strokes, drops and splotches. This ornamental character often pushes figuration into the background, which not least makes it possible to circumvent the Malawian pornography ban – which is rendered absurd by the reality of internet download statistics anyway. His play with ornamentation also brings the work closer to another medium: the "chitenje". These are rectangular 2x1m pieces of fabric that find manifold uses in Malawian everyday life (for clothing, as hand or carrying cloths, etc.). They are known for the variety of their patterns and are offered at travelling markets weekly in the villages.

Kloser works in every environment, adapted to it: sketch-like drawings or small-format acrylic works on paper are created almost daily, seemingly diary-like; iPad paintings only when electricity permits, large-format paintings when materials and daylight allow. Logistics seems a relevant, locally forgotten aspect of his creation: works usually remain where he lived, to receive further processing there later – a working rhythm that must be understood in years for some works. Thus his works also connect into fragmentary strands of his life path – a trail. The concrete transports for the current exhibition involved logistics companies, an aunt from Vorarlberg, the Austrian postal service, and Kloser's own willingness to transport. Even the email transfer of the high-resolution images needed for the exhibition flyer required a 120km drive to Mzuzu, where the internet allowed a reliable file transfer.

We are all the more pleased to present this exhibition – Kloser's first solo show since 2013.

Text: Christian Bazant-Hegemark