Aus des Vorhangs Falten

Equally poetic, as the referenced poem of Rilke in the exhibition title, artist Eliza Wagener (*1994) shares intimate narratives of ambiguity. Diffuse beings in tenderly figurative manners carry ideas of threshold-like states. Hazy, they seem to find themselves neither on nor behind the canvas, but interwoven within. Their silhouetted bodies sometimes tell of volatil song lyrics, sometimes of personal memories and other times of past daydreams and nightmares. They are narratives of the liminal, of phenomena that stand at the edge of perception, finding themselves in twilight transitions and in the diffuse.

The artist, who studies at the HFBK Hamburg, relies in her works on the coincidences of her painting technique to take on them intuitively. Therefore she lets paint with a high water content flow in numerous streaks across the canvas so that the ultra-liquid glaze runs over the surface and initially creates a basic abstract, arbitrary painting field. The random traces of Wagener's formal preparation are the material dictum of the further process. On the basis of this arbitrariness, the artist's intervention brings shapes and figures out of the traces of the course.

The motifs thus created do not originate from a concrete painterly construction, such as a preliminary drawing or a previously conceived narrative concept. The artist understands her motif worlds much more as part of a found reality within the canvas. Like ghostly appearances, on the doorstep of perception, they seem to manifest themselves only for a period of time, like semi-transparent visitors. Melancholic in fairytale-like images, they link up with Wagener's personal emotional world. This state is now permanent, even if it continues to appear fragile and elusive due to the impression of visual noise that has been created. The renunciation of gender or other identitary attributions within the world of characters also works towards this appearance.

What Eliza Wagener brings forth in her paintings is interpreted by her as what the canvas somehow already contained and secretly hid. Like Rilke's night, which digs through the dark folds of curtains to grasp for delight in the trace of the forgotten, it almost seems as if everything painted - the figures, the bodies and the ghostly beings - had been there long before. As if it only needed the painter's tender care to quietly bring them out of the depths of the canvas.