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art Magazin: Radar

by Evelyn Pschak
May 2010


It is not easy to write about Angelika J. Trojnarski in springtime.
Her art heralds the forces of decay, the picturesque of ruins,
and evokes the eroded dignity of all things temporal so
unerringly that one scarcely believes young buds still will grow.
Anyway, there is no tender shade of green on this 31 year-old
artist’s palette. I have the pleasure, now in this month of delight,
to write about her, a student of Markus Lüpertz and Herbert Brandl,
whom I juried into an exhibition beginning in May. It brings together
students from academies in Munich and Düsseldorf in a
comparative as well as enriching confrontation.

Everything Breathes the Past

“I don’t paint people, I paint their remains”, Angelika Trojnarski
sums up her basic Vanitas motif. She discovers it in ghost towns,
like the former gold rush settlement Bodie, east of San Francisco,
visited by the artist in September 2009, and also in the shabby
fairgrounds of her 'Skeleton Park' series: the Spreepark in Berlin’s
Plänterwald, whose operator fell foul of the Peruvian drug mafia,
or the Ukrainian amusement park that nearly opened in 1986,
but Chernobyl came first. A weather-beaten carousel still standing
there, not only eaten away by rust but also in a strangely suspended
state of picturesque. As if the painting is decaying like its subject.
Also the rickety windmills of the Spreepark prove the artist's ability
to accurately trace crumbling structures and disperse them at the
same time, like a dream's vague precision.


Texte in Deutsch





The dismal wooden shacks of Bodie are visited with will-o’-the-wisp whirls of colour in shades of beige and blue. Here, too, Trojnarski succeeds in overcoming the antagonism between the airy trembling instability of crumbling building planks and tonal, colour-soaked earthiness. Memory still seeps out of the overlapping layers of colour, bursts through the plaster of the painted buildings, through the areas where the canvas has been left blank. Through permeable porosity everything breathes the past. Even in its decay proving its continuum.

“The Beauty in Imperfection”

A visitor to Angelika Trojnarski’s studio in the Düsseldorf Art Academy finds next to her oil paintings some small models, hand-made from wooden pallets, of huts also to be found in the ghost towns. Cracks in the roof offer a view of the interior, the used wood from the Düsseldorf’s waste repository, still bears traces of weathered paint, greyish or bluish. The artist finds this most accommodating: “I am not a fan of blatant colours; my palette is always softened with grey.” Yet her colours never appear dull or ashen. Light flickers through the cracks, illuminates the architecture and artefacts — or what is left of them — refracts as through clouds, and lends a silvery shimmer to the structures emerging from opaque density. “I do not like immaculate surfaces, but prefer imperfection's beauty”, as the artist decidedly explains. Effortlessly she succeeds in elevating the broken, the rotten, the forgotten. And out of them develops such bizarre beauty that one almost could forget springtime.

'After the Gold Rush'

by Kinsey/DesForges Gallery
Los Angeles
September 2009


Variegated decay and abandonment are the protagonists
of Trojnarski’s work - dissolving dwellings and orphaned
amusement parks, rusted ship hulls and the rickety edifices
of a civilization desperately denying its own condition and
fate. Focusing on the architectural remains and industrial
excess of an economic fall-out, Trojnarski examines how
humanity’s true strengths can be dwarfed by the greed and
myopia of a dominant few, leaving those affected clinging to
their residual past and wondering what went wrong.

In this investigation, Trojnarski creates a certain
Baudelairean beauty; fractured planes propel outward,







sustained by unfaltering scaffolds and solid foundations, all
brilliantly illuminated under awash of radiant light. A heroic
optimism motivates the apparent wreckage, demonstrating the
vast potentiality for change and regrowth. She explains, “This
exhibition is a dichotomy of attraction and rejection, temptation and
redemption.“ These “seductive still lifes of destruction,“ caught in
arrested motion like a neglected construction site, hauntingly bear
witness to the traumas within our collective memory. Like skeletons
of their former selves, the images seem to lament an irrevocable
loss while implicitly calling for an effort to move forward and rebuild
the twisted spine of social conscience.


'White Elephant'

by Prof. Dr. Guido Reuter
Academy of Arts Düsseldorf
Professor of Medieval through Modern History of Art
January 2009


The picture White Elephant shows a ship, whose hull and
other superstructures, crowned with a flag, protrude
skeleton-like in the artwork's facture. The wreckage is
supported by vertical and diagonal piles whose unsys-
tematic and almost chaotic arrangement demonstrates a
pathetic stability. The entire formation of the stranded ship -
including the useless supporting piles on land - testifies to
the inevitable process of decay and decline.

What does the title White Elephant mean in terms of what
is visible in the painting, as nothing is apparently remini-
scent of an elephant, especially a white one?
To this day in Thailand white elephants are held to
be sacred animals, are symbols of power, not to be used for
work, and need a lot of care. Thus they are a considerable
financial burden to their owners. In the past, white
elephants were even presented to the king’s enemies as
gifts, so they would suffer heavy financial losses, or even
total ruin.
This is what the expression “white elephant” refers to in the
English language. It describes a valuable possession that is
useless, makes more work than it’s worth, and is simply a
burden. The idiom “white elephant” also exists with
reference to development policy. In this context “white
elephants” are objects, which are expensive, cause social
and ecological damage, and bring few benefits
(e.g. controversial building projects like dams).

Like White Elephant, all the other paintings by Angelika J.
Trojnarski engage with human failure in a symbolic way
through stranded, broken, useless, decaying objects.
Despite technical protheses, decline and decay cannot be
stopped.
Progress to one person may be lethal danger to another.
The art historian Thomas W. Kuhn very rightfully pointed
out that Angelika J. Trojnarski's paintings refer to the








tradition of the memento mori (reminder of one’s own
mortality) and the vanitas theme (the transitory nature of
life).

Why does the viewer not immediately turn away from the
destroyed - terrible and sometimes even ugly - objects?
What is it that, on the contrary, produces a maelstrom, and
compels the viewer to look repeatedly and intensely at
these paintings?

For me, it is the special something that the French
eighteenth-century philosopher, art historian, and writer
Denis Diderot described - for the first time in art history -
about Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin's painting The Ray:
It is the “peinture”, the special painting technique,
the skill of Chardin, which in an inexplicable, even magical
way transforms the ugly, ghastly ray into a thing of beauty
and worthy of contemplation. Chardin’s “peinture” spins this
object into the painting's coherence so that the viewer
does not shy away from it in disgust, but stares at it in
fascination.

Angelika J. Trojnarski's paintings also possess this quality
in their own individual way. Her masterly art of painting, the
manifold handling of the paint's materiality, the tones and
moods of the colours generated, bring forth a structured
colour tone weaving her motifs into a fascinating oneness:
this is what holds back the viewer from fleeing, and
relentlessly drives the gaze back to the motifs.

The paintings' surfaces lay open their processual creation,
exhibiting “tears” and “wounds” arising from the powerful
painting technique and a variety of interventions in the
paint's materiality. Here the artist develops the pictorial
character of her subjects - a vital factor in why the pain-
tings are such self-contained, consummate works of art.


'Shadows and Fog',
by Peter Frank
Author for L.A. Weekly
January 2008


The young Polish artist A. J. Trojnarski infuses her paintings with a hefty dollop of middle-European angst and alienation
without falling victim to myriad cliches. Her palette may be dank and dreary, but it glows like fog with a diffuse light and
establishes a compellingly indistinct space in which figures and structures struggle to define themselves. Everything in
Trojnarski's pictures has an almostness to it, with parts of machines and parts even of people fading from opacity and
seeming volume to an almost gossamer transparency.
The things occupying Trojnarski's cityscapes and interiors - and, indeed, the cityscapes and interiors themselves - hover in
and out of existence, as if in a dream or a recollection. As Trojnarski reminds us, sight and memory are both grossly faulty
modes of perception, but they're all we have with which to hold the world.