Florian Roithmayr (1976) is a cultured artist, he has an extended and deep knowledge of the sculpture discipline, he knows its history and evolution. The artist studies forms, gestures and processes that characterise this practice. The investigation runs along a rigorous research path, made of experimentation and study. There is a communion between the exploration of techniques and materials and the analysis of gestures and creative procedures.
It is particularly interesting the importance that Roithmayr gives to the observation of the moulds used for the production of the sculptures, as if he wanted to get acquainted with the matrices that lead to the artistic creation.
This familiarity with the history of the sculpture is marvelously in accord with the unpredictability coming from the connection between different materials, techniques and styles. These forms are unexpected and unique, mysterious and fascinating. The artist is a profhet, the artwork is an oracle.

The elements are mixed on the basis of an ancient knowledge but the result is always open, surprising, never totally calculable.

The exhibition these here withins, curated by Bianca Baroni, at Renata Fabbri Gallery in Milan, underlines efficaciously the complexity of the German artist. It is a research that aims to the creation of a new and unexpected relationship with the world of the sculpture. The first work presented is Nowadays cocoon, it gets our attention for a specific monumentality, very different from the ordinary one. The artwork is tall more than three meters but it is ethereal, light, in harmony with the wall. From down it climbs to the top, tightening more and more, converging at the end in one point. It is an attractive simplicity, composed by few sinuous lines and by a circle.

An idea of circularity is present in the whole show, every room contains small white spheres made of chalk. They are essential and poetic, sometimes their surfaces are perfectly homogeneous, sometimes are broken. Observing them, something of archaic appears.

If we look towards the wall that unites the firts two rooms, we see a series of six works similar to the coral. They are created mixing chalk and pigment. These small sculptures are gently supported on the white wall, creating a beautiful colour scale made of yellow, blue, green, orange, viola and red. The Form n.16 is in the middle of the second room, the sculpture is intensely yellow, it is rich of inlets and ravines, supported above to a smooth and uncontaminated slab of blue steel, sustained by a wood and iron support. This work contains, in an exemplary way, the density, the comptence and the study that Florian Roithmayr dedicates to his creation. We see the result of a fascinating and mysterious process: the liquid chalk is invaded by the polyurethane, it is a particular form of reciprocity. After, the artist cleans up the chalk from the polyurethane. It is a slow operation, that discovers new paths and possibilities to cross the sculptural substance.

It is certanily a free creative practice but, at the sime time, there is reflection. Using Roithmayr’s words we can say that his research imagines “ a new way to think the sculpture as a flux between negative and positive space.”

Pistacchio is a homage to the “negative”, it is a small shapeless mass, a fragment coming from the creative action realised by the artist that is an istigator rather than a creator. The importance of the leftover probably wants to focus the attention on the value of the process and its implications, and not only on the final result.
The serigraphy These here withins, presented in the last room, concludes the development of the show. Some sections of moulds are represented on the paper, these are forms that recur in the exhibition appearing, for example, in  Nowadays cocoon and in EndStart n.12.

They are the signs of a passionate research conducted by the artist, during his explorations of numerous European museums. A journey that studies the matrices and the sources that have given life to a myriad of sculptures.

The attempt to formulate new hypotheses and possibilities of work, to experiment new creative approaches, rediscovering the sources of the vision, in order to project them in the future.

Andrea Grotteschi

Info:

Florian Roithmayr – these here withins
Renata Fabbri Arte Contemporanea
September 18  – November 3 2018
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 15.30 /19.30 Monday and mornings by appointment