28/09/2017
Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź
Sanyofikacja. The Miracle of Representation
Sanyofikacja (Sanyofication) is a process which draws on the idea of television transmission. It is also an operation that enables transmission of images over long distances, as well as a machine capable of changing the dimensions in which an object is placed and subjected to the process. Between the existence and non-existence extends the whole range of intermediate states, among which the spectrality is only one of the most obvious ones. These intermediate states of existence and non-existence appear and disappear as the transition between dimensions proceeds from the second to the third.
Igor Krenz is an artist whose work often exemplifies his search for paradoxes of the so-called new media. This time, the exhibition at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, presents two works in which a seemingly innocent and accidentally found object of culture becomes a basis for the exploration of complex relationships between the abstract and the figurative, material and immaterial, poetry and prose, object and background, and, even, between art and curatorial activity.
One day Krenz came across a collection of scientific books entitled "Mathematical Morphology in Remote Sensing", which were filled both with texts and illustrations. They were offered at a reduced price so he bought a whole pile of them from which he then "produced" ten videos, one sculpture, two installations, four paintings and a mural. As a result, all the illustrations became artworks and the book became a catalogue for an exhibition. We are dealing here with translation, multiplication, but also with a multi-level game with what contemporary art is about. The artist interweaves the mathematical concepts of with post-conceptual ideas, as a result of which creates witty comments about the world of Art.
Apart from "Mathematical Morphology in Remote Sensing" Igor Krenz got into possession of the scheme of integrated television circuits produced by no longer existing brand of Sanyo company. The scheme proved to be full of existential problems, references to the dark side of reality. It revealed subjects such as depression on one hand and euphoric states on the other. This inverted "ready-made" process is the one in which the found curatorial text generated work. The artist assumed that television is a process. The TV makes us see something that ‘is not’. Krenz used the metaphor of the “perhaps existing” 2½D world. It is s a concept of something that is not fully three dimensional but surely not just flat either. It is a problem considered only on a theoretical level, all attempts to resolve it in reality would border on madness.
Many theosophists and artists of the first avant-garde or founders of abstract painting, have often been interested in the concept of “the fourth dimension”. It is a view of some kind of world that would be related to ours just like our world would relate to two dimensional one. “The fourth dimension” was a theory that allowed to combine what is spiritual with what is scientific. Similarly, Igor Krenz imagines the creation of the final two-dimensional object on the Sanyo TV screen as a process that takes place in “the two and a half-dimensional” world. In the world where objects are shaded, though light is falling on them, their spatiality is, to a degree, doubtful.
Igor Krenz. Sanyofikacja. The Miracle of Representation exhibition is related to a wider project exploring the world, whose existence is determined by two and a half dimensions. The 2½D world is a two dimensional world that constantly produces illusory 3D objects. And vice versa – it is a world of three dimensions which, by flattening and merging into the background, camouflages 3D objects. While at the sister show of the Grupa Budapeszt [Budapest Group] in Trafostacja gallery in Szczecin, the starting point was the well-known three-dimensional world which reduced itself by a half, showing a number of strategies for its camouflage, at the exhibition in Łódź the starting point was a two dimensional world that swung towards the 3D world.
The two-dimensional technical patterns themselves become scores that orchestrate the world they are part of. Hence, it is only a step away from asking about the generative aspect of modern technologies, about their status of specific notations, the collection of executive instructions that may bring technology beyond the level of its usefulness. What happens if every item found becomes a notation to which in order to read it we simply need to find the key? These and other questions about the fundamental issues of artistic production and the hidden meaning of reality will be answered by Igor Krenz himself supported by curatorship of Grupa Budapeszt.
