with partly new large-format works richard kaplenig creates a sensual, powerful show in the gallery artdepot. his motifs come from the world of things, from meat mincing knives to carabiners to screw pieces or various glasses. kaplenig creates photographic-like formulations with a narrow palette, reduced to black, grey, indigo and a few other colours. technically perfect, he places his motifs in an open, empty space. cool and sober, ostensibly determined by objectivity, the objects, precisely captured in perspective and set in oversized scenes, develop a physicality of their own and at the same time gain an aesthetic value of their own. kaplenig elevates his subjects to the status of cult objects. they appear simply beautiful, graceful and desirable. in doing so, his painting transgresses, erases and alienates an initially obvious reference to reality. it is therefore not the reproduction of everyday objects that establishes the presence in kaplenig’s paintings, but the breaking with reality. in kaplenig’s case, with the help of maps. pasted onto the canvas, they not only form another painting background, but bring an additional reality into the picture as an abstraction. it is the landscape captured in cartography that breaks out of the painting layers in a clearly legible way. contour lines, topographical inscriptions, altitude indications etc. not only mutate into subtle design elements, but also intertwine the abstract representation of regions with oversized, reality-related representationalism. – dr. willi rainer
