Tensional. Persons Projects.

Exhibition: 29 June – 31 August 2024
Opening: Saturday, 29 June 2024, 6 – 9 pm
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects is pleased to announce its summer exhibition Tensional Integrities. This exhibition brings together a group of artists who infuse into their works through their use of line, sound, space, and color to form a condition of visual and physical harmonious tensity. This presentation represents five distinctly different material approaches in how they pursue their own narratives in exploring their innate sensibilities.
Niko Luoma plays with illusion and three-dimensionality. His photographs are created by using the analogue process of exposing light through colored filters onto the same negative many times. He then digitally folds them only once along one of the lines connecting the key points. The starting point of the Pictures series is the film negative itself and its standard rectangular format with four corners and one center. The idea of the five sides of the negative refers back to Lewis Baltz’s explorations as described in his 1972 interview. Standard photographic composition is predominantly based on the key points of the rectangular film format – its corners, the midpoints of the sides, the center, the principles of perspective, and symmetry. Everything is based on doubling and halving: aperture, shutter speed, etc. Then, when assembling the film, fold lines are created based on the same key points, for example, from corner to corner, creating geometric forms. The Pictures series challenges the usual formality of photography by introducing the idea of folding as part of the finished work, where form becomes equal to content.
Finnbogi Petursson’s artistic practice focuses on the study of sound. He visualizes the silence emitted by objects and the tension that the sound waves produce. “Relatives” is a series of works consisting of metal plates made of different base materials such as brass, copper, and aluminum that are put together in versatile combinations of two. Relatives unite two metal rectangles, more precisely aluminum and copper plates, fixated in parallel onto a wall in front of an amplifier which distributes information generated by sound files in the form of vibrations through them. Petursson measures the quality of those metal plates according to their specific thickness, density, size, and weight. He then feeds them with a frequency of oscillation evoking them to drone on a certain amplitude coordinated to their inherent characteristics.
Grey Crawford was one of the first West Coast artists who challenged the photographic medium through his darkroom experiments with both black and white and color photography. His Umbra series (1975-1979) is composed of black and white silver gelatine prints—photographed throughout the 1970’s in Southern California. By using the darkroom as his palette, Crawford introduces hard-edged, abstract shapes based upon the California painter John McLaughlin’s forms through the use of masks. Grey Crawford incorporates these basic geometric shapes and lines into his photographs, creating his own landscapes, almost like a stage for an undefined play. The shapes become the building blocks by which he establishes his own visual language.

Nanna Hänninen, who has played a pivotal role within the Helsinki School since the late 1990s, was one of the first Finnish female artists to work conceptually, utilizing the photographic process to realize large abstract images. In her series New Landscapes, the mixture of lighting and long exposure transforms the works into short movies that display in each shot a range of organic body movements (breathing, heartbeat, laughter, talking, walking during the exposure time). The subject is public spaces from metropolises, buildings, and factories, to cemeteries, airports, and towers. These urban landscapes become drawings of actions, documented through photographic material as rhythmical light lines where the subject and scenery melt into a single image. What we find are highly abstract photographs with semi-translucent, intangible backgrounds, and sketchy undulating movements, with lines contracting, expanding, and entangling, with fields and clusters of color.

Marcin Jasik’s abstract paintings carry their visual literacy, which he then reduces through his own aesthetic filter to create a feeling of open spatiality. His canvases emit a sense of lightness in how he utilizes an effortless score of gestures and strokes through a series of applied lines and shapes to create a state of ocular tensions. Jasik builds up his reduced narrative by using thin layers of paint and acrylics to choreograph his own synaptic compositions in his visual pursuit of what’s essential, the essence behind what we see but feel. They represent his pursuit to form a new perspective on how to balance the material world with the spiritual. Jasik’s canvases address his basic questions about the nature of human existence. His source for this internal inquiry comes from the Legend of St. Francis fresco by Giotto di Bondone from the Basilica of Assisi. Jasik abstracts the basic lines from the scene where St Francis renounces his earthly possessions.