In the solo exhibition SIZE, Klaus-Martin Treder (born 1961, lives and works in Berlin) deals with the materiality and contextualization of painting and objects. The tension between abstraction and becoming concrete forms the foundation of his work.
Covered with a viscous paint slurry in a strongly colored base tone that hermetically envelops the canvas, an image body forms that makes color physically tangible as a material. Objects appear on the rich color and are applied and draped in a second, independent process, transforming the image from two- to three-dimensionality. We are dealing with precisely balanced image structures. The artistic action takes place in the constant addition and removal of the objective components. In addition, there is the partial painterly treatment of the objects, such as the boxes filled with paint or the sponges soaked in paint.
The painting presented in this way finds its context in the socio-cultural reference spectrum of color as a material and carrier of meaning as well as objective worlds of things. With synthetically produced drippings and layerings, finished parts made of paint, which are created as an archive and staged on the picture, “the” painting is coolly dissected, reassembled and enriched with
Things that are processed in an independent procedure and integrated into the image. They serve as an intermediate stage towards painting, naturalized painting media, object and color carrier at the same time, whose function is artistic, while at the same time their reference and symbolic value comes into play.
In this way, all components are tied to the painting and at the same time it revolves significantly around people. Even if any style is avoided that is generally considered "the" expression of the author's subjectivity, the idea of a certain authorship is mobilized through the things of everyday life, and one involuntarily wonders to what extent the objects could perhaps be read autobiographically. in the sense of a self-portrait. And if not related to the artist, then possibly to another person. An open, since unconfirmed, mutual assignment of meaning arises between product and persona, which extends into economic reflections on the things we consume, because what we consume says something about us and society. The human being as Pars pro Toto effectively becomes part of the painting, turning it into an anthropomorphic allegory.
Compared to the pictures, objects, like in this exhibition, amount to a radical change of register. However, they actually emerged from these in the noughties. As now independent protagonists in the room, they flank the discussed topics in a rather fragile and disembodied manner, not following a classic sculptural understanding. Garments that dangle from them take on a material, painterly function and at the same time serve our desire to project a human figure. Just as we are all too happy to attribute animistic properties to the steel support. The significance that the human prop radiates again raises the question of proxy. Whether the object is to be understood as a kind of clothing of the author with references to a hidden individuality (portrait, personal selection) or as a representative of collectivity (off-the-peg goods, general availability) ultimately remains in limbo. The construct thus “behaves” analogously to painting, which as an art form per se stands for individualism, but suppresses this through the use of primarily indirect strategies.
The complex question of what form painting can take today in view of artistic and economic influences is negotiated in Klaus-Martin Treder's exhibited works in an option that, not without eccentricity, is thought of in terms of the material in a social resonance space.
