Urban escape

lasithi mountain freedom/ austere and barren/ clearing my souls burden/ being tender to my senses

a living room in the cretan mountains/ store or café/ snap shot of a humble life/ the proprietors aged faces with soul/ question our urban values

it’s only a path/ not even steep/ that we stumble

rolling stones/ no moss/ scratching undergrowth

flocks of sheep/ curious goats/ a timid watch dog

wire gates to open/ a prickly puzzle/ closing even harder

life’s metaphor/ but only a walk/ in the cretan wilds

Coal mine desperados

scorched mountains/ twisted black sculptures once bushes/ hues brown not green/ blue sky though/ a perfect ridge for climbing it seemed/ skid walking on soot/ to get there and back/ scrambling suspicious rock/ adventure miners

Slovenia near Triest.

burn giorno/ dober dan/ where austria once went to sea/ it’s meadows trees and rocks/ nature knows no borderline/ frontiers are the will of man

scull like bizarre shapes/ bleached stones/ or are they bones/ lying in the karst meadows

Triest

Boulders for the pixies

Val Rosandra Triest

comici danced on rock/ tells us the myth of val rosandra/ stone white crags/ against september blue sky/ is the scenery for our stiff limbed attempts/ to shuffle upwards on easy rock

Slovenian Craging

Crinri Cal

bittersweet relentless unforgiving/ like slovenian/ no vowels

HRD CLMBS

steep power moves/demanding grades/ a boltless threshold getting off the ground/test of nerves

Luna Park

a pinch of dolomite exposure/ moves that move you/ let’s call it easy

Hannah Scheiber organised an amazing event in the village high up in the Ötztal at the convention centre „Carat“. She invited four artists and me to exhibit our art work. Another NoTopo show for a different audience than so far; summer tourists and some of the local hoteliers. She actually managed to persuade Reinhold Messner to hold a talk here. He is getting on a bit and it was difficult to get him to come. But Hannah’s charm was irresistible. I met some really nice people, especially the moderator Manuela Kamper and the artists Hannah Scheiber, Nina Gospodin, Alexander Maria Lohmann and Peter Stoeckl. We had long, stimulating and inspiring conversations about our work.

Sorry only the final two pics from this incredible exhibition. There a much better ones most probably on the Biennale website! Best you go there and see for yourself. It’s a knock out.

The Exhibition

architecture show/ venice biennale is calling/ thrilled to be there

high end aesthetics/ poetry in stone and bricks /sensorial building

a new generation/ showing sheer design power/ thinking far ahead

total exhaustion/ another exciting idea/ again, and another

Tourists in Venice

tourists like cattle/ bellowing in all languages/ sight seeing driven

a kind of stampeed/ football crowds going culture/ rumbling trolly wheels

a future atlantis/ venice built on marshy soil/ born to become a myth

The final two pics are from the exhibition, from the scandinavian pavilion. Just to make you puzzled. 😂😜👍

It’s the sketchbooks again! They seems to turn the visitors on again and again.

Someone told me it could be that instead of staring at a picture on the wall or quickly walking past a sculpture you „hold the artist in your hands“. It’s getting away from the concept of entering an „art temple“ where you devotedly bow your head before the brilliant work of the artistic genius and move on. Sketchbooks are messy, imperfect, human but therefore authentic. You can take your time browsing through the pages. It’s haptic, personal, intimate. An appropriate alternative to seeing the world behind the glass screens of our now digital world. It’s low threshold. You approach the visitor. Art becomes tangible.

All of a sudden I am exhibiting. As a „has been“ industrial designer“ I have stumbled into the art world. Its so different to designing for a client. It follows different rules and rituals, which I am slowly getting used to.

The following pics are from two notopo exhibitions (Kunstverein artP in Perchtoldsdorf and VRSCHWNDN at the Kunsthaus Baden) and one about dreams in Christine Gobis Studio where I showed excerpts from my dream diaries.

The picture of the bubble and the „dream houses“ are by christine gobbi who kindly made it possible for us both to exhibit together with children from her school at her studio.

Fog prison escape/ At the blue canvas above/Amazed we stare

Contrailed blue sky/Snow in small patches only/ Spat onto jagged rock

Nov. Dec.24

the sea slapping time/ a refuge for my weary sole/ this place of power

piercing thorns and brambles/ a wild haptic experience/ steep mountain goatland

in a minoan maze/ we wander from rock to rock/ to find the logic line

junk yard fruit orchards/ oranges and rusting dead cars/ like eden gone mad

our dream to be free/ to roam untrodden ground/ rock don quixotes

just like children/ on an adventure playground/ stone free exploring

we leave no traces/ give no clues or publicise/ it’s no name routes

drifting with the thermic/ emperors of endless sky/ my vulture friends

slow, steady pace/ rusty, bumps and dents, friendly/ a cretan pick up

the acid smell of/ sweat and thyme in ragged jeans/scented memories

razor rock hand holds/ gale force winds slapping your face/ break dance not climbing

the beat of waves/combing barren beaches/ it’s the rhythm of life

Summer 24

Some rough sketches and minimalistic Haikus

ominous at first 
foggy veils obscuring peaks
no summit to see

the high up world
granite sheets, water striped
glistening with light

mountain rock debris
a jumbled mass of stone giants
natures sculpture park

the cwm of desire
a sea of boulders to cross
until rock paradise

unknown rock terrain
now high on adrenalin 
like many years ago

clean cut horizon 
clean mountain air
makes me think straight

I nearly forgot. We had a strange experience in Crete last April. Krista and I scrambled NoTopo in the Cretan mountains. But it was like in the Sahara during a sandstorm for a few days. A low pressure zone was moving across from Afrika carrying the dessert sand. It was weird. The sea seemed to be boiling. The sky a kind of yellow red hue obscuring the view. Enclosed some sketches, photos and collages visualising our adventure. 

The recent months have been spent  – when time – with Krista on our usual outings, climbing, walking and biking. I have begun to run uphill again with poles to support my lacking balance going downhill. There I prefer to walk though. I would call my present mountaineering style “scrambling and shuffling”. It’s going to be the new hype for the golden agers 😂😂😂. (Deutsch: “Kraxeln und Schleichen”). 

The enclosed pics show the my momentary graphic experiments. Just sketching outdoors is getting boring. Really it’s all about a kind of “fragmented memory”. So I now mix sketches with photos which I sometimes mistreat by soaking the prints in alcohol (no the photos, not myself) and using them as collages, or painting over the prints or…? I could do all that easily with photoshop or the like, but I want to do things more “hands on” now. As opposition to digital domination.

And I’m getting things taped in my visual stories. Washi ist what it is. Very dangerous, because it’s so pretty.

Go climb a hill
maybe a mountain 
google says 
dead end track

surprise!

a rock ridge 
easy to scramble

then

wild cretan mountainside
bushes rocks
sheep tiptoe’s meandering
to where the sky takes over

downhill stumble
to flower meadow
power to colour

us

just sitting listening
to the wind moaning

our cretan phantasies 
thus satisfied

Another exhibition venue. This time at a recently developed housing area in Vienna (Sonnwendviertel) at the so called “Graetzelmixer”, roughly translated “neighbourhood mixer”. This is a wonderfully large space for all kinds of events. The NoTopo exhibition was up for two days and very well visited, considering it being just a small show. 

What was most surprising was that a table containing a number of personal sketchbooks seemed to be the magnet for all visitors. Maybe this has something to do with the sterility of our digital world, where we are getting bored looking at pictures on a screen. Paging through a booklet is something haptic and thus a very analog experience. Also maybe a low-threshold means of perceiving art. In the sense of: “Maybe worth having a go at sketching myself, some of the stuff seems really simple”. 

It was fun exhibiting, a really open and pleasant atmosphere with much discussion and good talks. 

Von meinem iPad gesendet

Pics: Peter Stoeckl, Christine Gobi, Sandra Oberzaucher, Michael Freund and most probably other friends who kindly sent me some fotos. Unfortunately I did not write down their names. Thank you anyway and sorry for the confusion! Thanks also to the society operating the graetzelmixer and especially Tatia for giving me the opportunity to exhibit and the great task of helping me running the show. Also thank you to my wife Krista helping at the exhibition and preparation.