Bellevue
Suzanne Tarasieve is pleased to present the second solo show in the gallery from the artist Zenita Komad, entilted Bellevue.
“When the letters are bored – and only then – they play paint-box.
They form an orderly line, first the ‘a’, and all the way in the back the ‘z’, from white through yellow, red, green, and blue to black. They do this in the hope that somebody will mix them up, stir them up a bit. Then the letters want to be playing cards, unite into pairs, group into houses that are as full as possible, be arranged into a royal flush, into a word, a sentence, a story. Yellow would like to sit next to green again for a change, rather than just always gossip with orange, purple always had a predilection for pink, and the bright green has always dreamt of a night with black and crimson.
The ‘a’ wants to form a significant ‘has’ with her cousins ‘h’ and ‘s’, and would like to be personally endorsed by the small team ‘he’. And three of the wye multiples are looking for suitable partners for a ‘eternally I’m your yes’ to travel jointly to Mumbai to see their brother. The bespoke suit for their playing field, the stretch frame, they have already freshly painted, and when the sky kisses the earth at the same time in Vienna and Beijing, then space is curved enough to make the trip pleasantly short. And those who think the shy old rose could not be made to scream, and the beige could only be applied to elderly ladies, makes an enormous mistake. The front row of the letters depicts only one possible order. Every poem is just as right. And the place for the ‘e’ is always immediately before or after the ‘h’. Unless they take they ask the ‘s’ to join them and become a ‘she’.
When the letters don’t feel like making sense once in a while, to represent the thoughts of some third party, or to be squeezed into hexameters, then they rest in a wild heap or go swimming in some soup, instead of sleeping, in an orderly fashion like crayons, in their letter case. Grains of sand, incidentally, act similarly: once the joy of trickling lets up, they flock together to form a fortified castle. Or they leave their box and spell ‘man is condemned to freedom’ on the canvas while playing ring-a-ring-a-roses.
Zenita Komad knows the letters and the colours and the grains of sand. She knows that they are related, she knows about the cord that links them all to the navel, about their joy in interacting, about their potential to articulate everything (be a light to the world ! sic). She knows that images will give birth to images, words will entail words, and deeds and ideas. In her catalogue book Opus IV: selected works, Komad has strung together groups of works chronologically ; in Bellevue, she shows a selection of Works from recent years in a different order : the sand picture encounters the varnish painting, and the charge state from last year encounters yesterday’s excerpt from the bookshelf. She took what was within reach (pflicht und schatten and i need no father), but did not put the building blocks together according to age, rather she reordered the annual rings and stretched the inner ones around the outer ones, and whitened the palette. That makes it more colourful and expands the field of the joyfully comparative disciplines of the zenita-universe. Which has revealed a floor plan, a piece of the foundation of the zenita-universe (a private ground open to all). Which shows that building is going on simultaneously in many directions, extended with all possible materials, on paper cemented in eternity, and sketched on canvas. The exhibition reveals itself as a handbook full of sovereign single pages, as a further correct order, as another beautiful knot in the red thread.
Before is just as much now. A zero point cannot be identified. The beautiful view knows no time. The future is viewed retrospectively here.“
Markus Mittringer, Vienna 2010.