Jes Brinch + Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Michael Peglau
AC Project Room
15 Renwick Street, 2nd floor, NYC
(212) 219-8275
Thru Dec. 23
Friendly and with a love for details painted landscapes by Michael Pelau are greeting you at your entrance to the new space of AC-Project. But inside sleeps the horror. The Kindergarten, this mostly expensive day-nursery filled with laughter and softly educating games and social plays burned out, destroyed by a fire. This site of a disaster looks convincingly natural with the dark wallpapers, the tiny chairs and tables, the burned downed small lockers and all the deformed plastic toys. The colorful world of a well protected childhood gone in an artistic special effect. Using trompe l'oel techniques and the never ending story of ready-mades it convinces you like an installation by Mark Dion, and it's playing with all your sleeping nightmares
of the possibility of something, that looks like the end of the world. It talks
a lot, about Waco, the Oklahoma bombing, burned out houses of Turkish people in
Germany by molotov-attacks of Neo-Nazis. It talks about war and what remains, a
dead world. Not only war but also natural catastrophes or terrible accidents.
It's the same story which you can find in the paintings. Two people walking
with bazookas through a field, airplanes crashed down into the peacefulness of
nature and God's own garden. It's beautiful as an art piece, it's babbling like a
talk show and it's posing a lot of questions. Mainly about the quality of
narrative art. Are we really at the point where we need the sleeping
fear which is involved in so many fairy tales? Where we need once again the
cruelty like that in so many "Grimms Maerchen"?
-Rainald Schumacher
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