Emmeric Konrad: Walking On Thin Ice Just To See My Reflection
at Tieken Gallery, Los Angeles (through 31, 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot
Emmeric Konrad paints angels with dirty faces, serafim porn stars, saints with reality-hangovers, and refugees from justice in rags of former couture. Chainsmokers at church, day-drinkers at Disneyland. His fraught and tectonic compositions are like stream of consciousness literature or automatic drawing, a madman writing complex pictographic equations. One imagines him painting in a trance, a frantic archeological dig for visions that spring forth; however almost nothing you see is random. Any given 12 square inch passages of a single panel contains multitudes enough to make a fine painting on its own, already as dense with detail as a neutron star is packed with atoms and also infinite invisible unfathomable emptiness. Using acrylic, oil, spray paint, and sharpie, Konrad conjures dots and swirls, scrawls and scratches, folds tucked inside flatnesses, passages of solid and eccentric colors, soft contours with sharp edges, vipers nests of line, awkward bent limbs, sagging flesh, perky nipples, loads of penises, and distraught animal spirits — especially the recurring appearance by a dangerous, bedraggled but eternally optimistic pink rabbit with a secret. The rabbit is all of us…
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