Charles Vreuls - "Falsche Frage" and
"TOVER MITGLIED" with Roland Berning
12 Jan - 16 Feb 2019 MIRAGE is our second duo exhibition with Charles Vreuls and Roland Berning, who collaborate artistically since 1994 as the “collective” TOVER, a modus operandi, a strategy to maintain artistic independence in an art world and art market that they see as paralysing their creativity by enforcing conformity to their respective dictates. Despite Vreuls and Berning working in completly different styles, they are united in operating on the edge of the established art world order. Charles Vreuls exhibits works on paper from his latest series, “Das Gesegnete Das Verfluchte” (“The Blessings The Curses”), the title of a composition by Peter Ruzicka and a homage to the Swedish composer Allan Pettersson. The works on paper, each in a modest format of 5 x 15 cm, display chaotic mixtures of lines and structures intricately interwoven with figurative elements, numbers and letters that command our attention to their detail but are also soberly presented as a collection in an exquisite, hand-made wooden box. Also on display are a group of his oil paintings: gestural, layered, mysterious, and complex with an occasional perfectly rendered eye. Roland Berning exhibits paintings and objects. The latter he intuitively composes of waste materials lying around his studio. Here they are displayed as an assemblage of small objects arranged on large painted sheets of cardboard, placed like pawns in an undefined game. Berning speaks ironically of a game that arose in May 1968, in which the rules have since been lost. On the assemblage are also noise generators that he constructed, then painted and decorated. During the opening, Berning will give a “concert” with these instruments, in which the element of chance (The “TOVER” factor) plays a certain role.
