The dream of an art review is to talk to an artist in their atelier and come out seeing the world differently, and so it was with Florian Nitsch’s in Vienna. I left with a new understanding of what a landscape could be and look like.
As a child, Florian’s artistic debut was catalysed by looking at piles of his parents’ photos and feeling something about them that worked and something that didn’t, that there was energy in them that needed his help to come out. He painted over one after the other to augment the photos and liberate their energy.
His artistic creation began with reformed landscapes and continued, with an ever-evolving language, threading in more and more elements. It is only natural to search for the physical in a landscape, to seek to recognise something represented. The landscape with the blue sky below –Picturesque (2014), I take to be of a scrap metal yard, with a skeleton of an abandoned truck on the right of the middle, nose down towards the bottom centre. Above it could be a twisted abandoned torso of an electricity transmission pylon.
The second Picturesque is a gold-skied landscape – presumably for pollution or Saharan sandstorms visiting Europe. The lines are less jagged, more curved, but I can’t make out anything, almost seeing fish skeletons, a bird, but then I notice the scratched-in word Ferrari; even high-class luxury turns to scrap. We start to see that Nitsch’s landscapes go beyond what one can discern in space by threading in written language as a new dimension and a new painter’s brush.
Zooming in now. Bieraufbütten (2016) below presents an etched pattern on a cut and rolled out beer can and the print of the form. The back of the can has become a landscape, almost a street map, yet the words are not street names, but Go, Ya, OK, Yes, and HeHe. We are pulled in and Florian has a little laugh while at the same time giving us the key to his work: physical structure, language, recycled materials from life form a new landscape.
Florian Nitsch’s landscapes evolved and adapted to his stay in New York. Thinkpig (2017) again has a strong grid structure, this time steel girders from a construction site. The red diagonal line suggests “No Entry”. The yellow rectangle at the top right are the lights from a home. A man just manages to look out. The text above says “outputputput”. The man’s face is only just above the girder, implying that people are barely keeping their heads above water, ceaselessly creating output to the insistent economic rhythm of put put put. There is another face to his left, Sigmund Freud’s from an old Austrian 50 shilling bill – creating a double nod to Austrian history, yet another layer in the artwork. But there is a cross on the banknote’s face. The money has been cancelled. Is Thinkpig a statement against productivist capitalism and social injustice? There is also the word “SAME” repeated before it becomes “SHAME”. A criticism of shopping chains and globalisation of culture? A patch of grass from Central Park is in a small rectangle at the bottom centre. There is a bit of natural landscape in Florian Nitsch’s socio-cultural landscape, but it has been bleached black and white and is only a small patch, a memory, not enough to have a picnic on – simply what is left after developers’ and town planner’s penchant for soil-sealing for profitable real estate. Is this a criticism of the impacts of urbanisation on nature? What do you perceive?
Note that sometimes Florian Nitsch has music to accompany the paintings – this soundscape adds to the landscape. Indeed, he often does live performances, painting, using an iPad and projecting onto the walls while a drummer plays. They feed off each other with the art driven by the music and the music by the drawing in a hypnotic symbiosis, adding a whole other layer to the socio-cultural landscape. Music becomes a type of light or paint.
Nature sometimes features explicitly. In the artwork below, the silhouette of the trees creates the structure, an organic grid. Oddly, the blue and white spaces between the trees almost look like giant stylised letters, creating a word I found impossible to decipher. The colours, however, made me think of Picasso’s Guernica, which brought a whole load of energy to the painting (and a pleasant surprise when I learnt that the title referred to Guernica). Second, while it looks flat as there is no geometrical perspective, there are layers: at the top right behind the tree, it could be the moon, the blue is the sky, the white on the sky feels like the blind spots when we or cameras stare at the sun. Then the trees. Real organic life in black. In the front line, the fluid handwriting suggests our intervention and cultural reality. But it draws on the trees, which are black, perhaps not just waiting for spring but dead, only a memory of life and now a canvas. Is this painting a Guernica of humankind’s attitude towards nature? Again, my lens possibly creates a meaning that is not yours.
Now to one of my favourites, and indeed the artist’s – a dark artwork despite the vibrant gold. It is titled Flo’s Medusa – which suggests Florian’s nemesis, i.e. look at this and die. It is indeed an icon of death as it is inspired by the Pieta, of Jesus in the arms of Mary Magdalene. He is painted in holy golden light, but the angles of the lines suggest anger and the pain of sacrifice. He is falling past a grid of windows of our society, with each window, its own story. I look again – Flo’s Medusa could be a crime scene, with the body contours declaring humanity’s crime, or a statement of Christ’s sacrifice for each family as he falls past life after life set up as an urban skyscraper grid.
An artwork has as many meanings as those standing before it. But that shouldn’t give us a license to forget to ask the artist. Flo’s Medusa is also a reference to the graveyard in the Mediterranean, a lament at the death of all those crossing in search of a better life but left floating in the cold dark waters, the gold of their lives seeping out of their bodies. Judging by the death count, Flo’s Medusa, the Mediterranean, is a monster far more terrifying than the Medusa from Greek mythology. We thought the Greek gods were cruel…
This landscape of urban life is again reflected and developed further in Égal (2019), focusing on the richness of life (each rectangle is full) and a socio-cultural critique. Nitsch alludes to égalité (equality) through the word Égal by losing some letters. But Égal means both equal and, through connotations of the use of the word in the German Das ist mir Egal (It is all the same to me), suggests not caring. Perhaps a statement of the weakening social bonds in many “modern” societies. The grid creates and comprises thirty-six rectangular landscape parts where few interact with each other. Parallel lives. Égal is a statement of today in another way: with the excess of information streaming and screaming at us from too many screens all at once, everywhere, all the time. It is a statement of multi-faceted contemporary reality, which can be an energising joy or simply too much. So Égal could equally be a celebration or a cry beseeching us to go back to calmer landscapes and life. A moment’s peace from our addiction to excess.
Finally, we get to the falling people against the pattern made by an escalator, hinting at the structure of the Twin Towers and a “homage” to the tragedy of September 11th through a socio-cultural landscape one hopes never repeats itself. The energetic lines communicate the pain, the transparency and the white, the loss.
Many of the elements of Florian Nitsch’s artwork return – the Pieta, the falling people, the gridwork, the writing, the small, bleached rectangle of grass. Each landscape doesn’t have a unity of space such as a particular landscape, but is a composite where meaning and memory replace simple 3D space, use and create their own space. Furthermore, each work is not only standing on its own merits but is part of a broader conversation through the range of repeat icons in different words of art, at different moments, in different places, to different audiences. So, the pictural socio-cultural landscape keeps growing. With the combination of music in co-creation, the landscape expands further, both folding in the music as an addition to form and colour and creating a soundscape in time– the three dimensions of space (four if you include transparency that brings in what lies on the other side), plus time, plus language, plus cultural-economic icons, personal memories (a grandfather’s postcard), music: so more like seven, eight, nine dimensions as a poetic palimpsest, or better yet, a landscape symphony. Art that we often think of as a static pictural representation, a moment’s capture of something special, can be much more and release the energies waiting for us.
This was just a taster of Florian Nitsch’s socio-cultural landscapes, which are visually attractive and steeped in meaning. Keep an eye out for his exhibitions and hypnotic happenings on his YouTube channel and website.
