“The scirocco winds carry the finest grains of Sahara sand with them. Every drop of rain contains a piece
of Africa. Funny how that works” (Kemp in an e-mail from Italy, April 15). This daytime placed atop that nighttime. And that’s called: barter. I switched light in for the contrary. I traded composition for style. Style for taste. Taste for attraction.
Wanting for annoyance. Ignore for eyes-closed. Eyes-closed for rest. Cozy for tire. Tire for wheel. Wheel
for we’ll. We’ll for you’ll. You’ll for old. New for buy. Get for material. Material for _______. Misalignment
for meaning. Incongruity for ingenuity.
The Brink of Cozy is made up of two artist’s work. For both, a formal axiom of restraint drives decision
making—or rather, restraint allows decisions to make themselves.
Penelope Stryjewski’s body of work, Point Blank, each start with a shared set of conditions. Constrained
to common scale; meanwhile, choice of color is left relegated to Marni runway collections. Stryjewski’s
past paintings followed an anti-intuitive method—using red for blue, a square for a circle, something
shiny for something matte. From this, each work had become the inverse of the thought; its impetus in
the negative. Point Blank paintings are “composed” (composure)—the result of a position towards
awkward vulnerability. Once an urge to cover up under relentlessness has pivoted, allowing the paintings
to reveal their thinking—neither oppositional, nor burdened by being seen.
Their support mechanism imposes a line of reserve in the room. These inset spaces are home to René’s
work, and René’s work only (sound has a habit of stretching into space, filling every corner regardless of
allowance.) Die unersättlichen Augen (Dub) made in collaboration with Philipp Wüschner, plays in
ten-minute cycles. No editing, no deliberate cutting—just the placement of two tracks at zero, letting
them do their thing. Die unersättlichen Augen (Dub) is the reconstruction of an occurrence which
happened casually, and then not so casually, as it became noticed. Ingeborg Bachmann’s An die Sonne
and Scientists 1981 Drum Song Dub were playing out of Kemp and Wüschner’s respective MacBooks,
and as “art is what happens to me”, they found each other. A practice in attention, its qualities, its
threshold, its lapses, and that which bypasses the filter. Give up sifting this from that.