Taking the side of things. Patrick Roman Scherer

In the organizer's words:

The focus is on things: not the beautiful or the special, but what is there anyway. A printer, a shelf, a tennis racket. Things that you use and then forget. In his drawings, Patrick Roman Scherer encounters these objects with instinctive attention. He removes them from any spatial context, enlarges them and embeds them in complex ornamental structures. They return in ever new constellations and condense into a growing repertoire, an archive of things.

Taking the side of things. Taking sides with things. The exhibition title goes back to an encounter with the poetry collection Le parti pris des choses by Francis Ponge. The French title could be understood more literally as The side taken by things - taking the side of things for themselves. Ponge's texts attempt to free things from preconceived meanings and give them their own voice. He does not describe them, but translates them into language in order to make their own life visible. Scherer's works follow a similar shift.

Filigree lines encircle the objects, superimpose them, hold them in place or release them again. Artistic and cultural-historical resonances open up: echoes of icons and sacred pictorial forms, Gothic ornaments, textile patterns or precious tapestries. The drawing imitates surfaces, evokes materiality, density and haptics. Open areas are juxtaposed with dense, ornamental zones. Precision meets freedom, rigor meets movement: Paper seems to fly through space, a tennis racket pauses in its swing, about to bounce.

At the same time, the drawing itself becomes the central protagonist. Even where painted surfaces are added, pencil on paper remains the starting point. The drawing does not remain in an intimate format, but expands, spills over into the exhibition space and develops into an installation. Works enter into a relationship with each other, take up motifs and take them further. The result is not a juxtaposition of individual works, but a flowing continuum. The space in between also becomes effective as a place of transitions and repetitions, in which a rhythm of its own develops.

It is a game of perception and expectation. What happens when a tennis racket is viewed with the same attention as a precious object? When does a shelf become worthy of a picture, a commodity an appearance? The tensions do not dissolve, they remain and keep the works open. A new, mobile order begins to form out of them. Structures emerge that elude a clear sense of time and space, in which the ordinary and the valuable, the present and the past exist in parallel. Scherer describes this process as a kind of untidy drawer: different things lie next to each other, without hierarchy, and thus enter into new relationships. What initially seems random follows its own logic, which only becomes apparent over time.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Patrick Roman Scherer (born 1988 in Kufstein, Austria) lives and works in Vienna. His artistic practice centers on drawing, especially pencil on paper and cardboard, which he expands into large-format works and expansive installations. He completed his studies in "Graphics and Printmaking Techniques" at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2017 and works as a freelance artist with a studio in Vienna. Since then, he has shown his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Austria and abroad.