Pia Fries’ Rhizomatic Rendering

“The overturning of oppositions especially between representation and action involves an act of deciphering that may never come to an end….” — Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model

Any viewer familiar with Pia Fries’ recent work knows that to examine it means getting involved and becoming part of an environment ruled by competing silkscreened appropriated fragments of botanical images and erratic tubular mounds and smears of multicolored paint. Rather than examine specific details in Fries’ paintings, let this text be an exploration of their broader contextual surrounding — an encounter to accompany the impressionable first-hand experience of the painted panels installed on all fours walls of the gallery. Just as Fries’ work exemplifies change in nature, one hopes that this essay, this trial, this investigation of conceptual and historical evolutions, may exemplify the nature of change in her work.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, a new generation of artists aimed to destabilize the heroic gestures of Abstract Expressionism its notions of authenicity, struggle, and resolution by incorporating assemblage, technological imaging processes, and seemingly deskilled mark making procedures. Whereas Robert Rauschenberg explored the use of found and mass-produced images through his combines, silk screened canvases, and newspaper transfer drawings, Cy Twombly explored the expressive and narrative capacities of the most humble and minimal of pictorial signs: the scribble, graffiti, and paint smear. Though often considered mutually exclusive, both modes extended and adjusted the processual breakthrough of Jackson Pollock and his generation, namely the gestural mark and the horizontal production procedure — what Leo Steinberg called the “flatbed image” — but liberated these from the tradition of emphatic authenticity.

Similarly concerned, the Affichistes Jacques de la Villeglé and Raymond Hains tore layers of advertisements from the walls and billboards of Paris while Mimmo Rotella co-opted movie posters from Rome’s busstops and building exteriors, exhibiting the results, usually untouched, as works of art. Theirs was a random, streetwise pictorial art that interrogated prevalent notions of refinement and artistic decision-making.

The continued incorporation of mass-produced images, often directly lifted from commercial sources and current events resulted in a strand of figurative, or “realist” practices that spanned from Pop Art to successive generations of appropriation artists, such as the 1970s “Pictures” generation of image scavengers and younger artists working in their wake who naively try to re-appropriate appropriation.

Pia Fries’ installations of mixed media compositions on wood may no doubt be considered within the context of the aforementioned evolutions among modernist and postmodernist practicioners, but she also employs painting as an independent open-ended activity to break free of the sometimes rigid dichotomies of art (history). Pia Fries has not merely remained immune to such picture-making trends, she has demonstrated, especially in this most recent work, that incorporating an image belonging to some known other, be that a place or person, can involve more than either a mere endorsement or rejection of its originary role. Simultaneously, she evidences that paint describes an active and natural process better than any other medium (particularly drawing, photography, and print making). Specifically in her exhibitions Loschaug (2005, 2006, and 2007) Pia Fries’ use of silkscreened references to images by and books about the 18th Century botanical artist Maria Sibylla Merian alongside, eliding, and incorporated with muscular oil paint renderings on wood panels challenge the illustrative role of a graphic image while celebrating the potential of painted gestures and colors to convey the idea of change in nature.

For example, schwarze blumen ”erucarum ortus” (2005) comprises four panels each with a horizontal unprimed band of silkscreened canvas where renderings of torn flower parts occupy alternating sides and disappear into the edge, buried between panels. These fragments were lifted from an inexpensive paper bound copy of Merian’s work titled Flowers Butterflies and Insects, which Fries found by chance in a local bookshop. The fact that already Merian’s image is a still taken from a fixed moment in time, albeit one which aims to be scientific and realistically portray a natural state, is not at all characteristic of the process of metamorphosis which Fries exemplifies in her own painted rendering. While Merian’s illustration is descriptive, Fries’ is dynamic and rhizomatic. Fries lets the paint activly respond to and describe change in nature not to present a fixed image from or stage therein. Accordingly just as source materials can be found anywhere and at any time, the effect of such magnanomous change is everywhere. Thus Fries creates an effect of multiple dimen-sions by breaking up the surface and, rather than making an object that can be categorized according to one point of view, she presents a complex subjectivity with multiple perspectives.

The critical mode of Fries’ presentation relies on in-directness and ambiguity. Her fragmentary juxtapositions maintain an arrangement not entailing harmony, concordance, or reconciliation but rather accepting disjunction or divergence as a mode of construction to make visible the gap between sign and referent. Like fragmentary literature where the author might indulge in a variety of fluctuating psychological distances, between subjects, characters and settings, truth shares space with whim. “As with any book dominated by the fragment, … one proposition, a momentary impulse, preceeds or follows another… Illt is the reader who must assign the roles.“¹ Here ambiguity is a valueable instrument by which content is made poetic through a process of recreation, a process that requires participation. Fries’ work celebrates not only a means to discover the unknown in the familiar but more importantly to subvert the apparent reality of a graphic or gestured image.

In the Passagen-Werk essays (written in 1928, 1934, 1937, and 1940) Walter Benjamin repeatedly makes reference to the political meaning of dialectical images, the construction of which is described as telescoping the past through the present: “it is not that the past throws its light on the present or the present its light on the past, but [this) image is that wherein the past comes together with the present in a constellation.”² Although the idea of dialectic usually implies a two-part exchange or linear movement not quite consistent with the rhizomatic structure of Fries’ work, Benjamin’s notion about historical change seems an interesting way to consider the ongoing immediateness of Fries’ subject.

Pia Fries’ use of appropriation can thus be understood as an ongoing investigation, presenting re-presentations of representations. It is neither a confrontation with nor a purely laudatory embrace of Merian’s practice, but rather a consideration of its significance in a new aesthetic context informed by the painted superimposition and overlapping of layers, work on and with thickness and color that implies speculation.