STRAY LIGHT
Kuckei + Kuckei
Linienstrasse 158 - Berlin
21/1/2012 - 3/3/2012
Before beginning his studies at Berlin’s College of Arts, Michael Laube played for awhile with the idea of becoming an architect. At first glance, one might regard this as a biographical footnote, but it is much more than that: here lies the key to the work of this artist born in Coburg in 1955. Because his interest in – or better: his feeling for – architecture has accompanied Michael Laube ever since. Even more: it has shaped his works in the sense that the architectural, our built environment, has been the sounding board for his art for many years now.
It began with a series of wall objects in which Laube systematically played out a rich spectrum of variations of the principle of spatial layering, using frieze-like ensembles whose extension was still almost two-dimensional. The works are constructed in such a way that, first, at least two panes of Plexiglas are fixated at a relatively small distance from each other. Then Laube applies the colors, whereby light and dark, warm and cold tones structure the painting plane in stripes, squares, and right angels of various sizes. These combinations of forms and colors give rise to quasi-perspectival compositions, conceived to be visually three-dimensional; despite their mostly flat organization, they create in the viewer the illusion of an ultimately often very ambiguous spatiality.
In a certain way, Laube’s objects, sculptures, and installations are mirrors of architecture. Just as a mirror can depict an object that in reality is beyond its own material limits – namely, in front of it – Michael Laube’s works, too, are entirely at home in the sphere of art. But what they specifically and mentally reflect calls up before the viewer’s inner eye an image of architecture that speaks in the subjunctive case: it could have been this way, as well. Or: this is how it would have wanted to be if it had only been permitted.
If one had to describe this relationship in a few words, one could perhaps say that the one stands in the same relation to the other as thesis does to antithesis. Michael Laube’s works are the exact opposite of architecture, but closely connected in their contrariety. They are the counter-image that arises when external constraints recede, purposefulness disappears, and the pragmatism of clearly defined use is no longer valid and, unnoticed, dissolves into nothingness. When colors demand their rights, when the material as such – the characteristics of surfaces, bodies, and volumes – become important.
Michael Laube’s works usually stand thereby in a very direct relationship to the space they are intended for; his exhibition in the Overbeck Society is no exception. The artist already reveals the proximity of his art to the parameters of the specific buildings by giving the exhibition the title ”Space 9”, although in reality it is distributed among three rooms. The numbering refers to eight preceding installations that Michael Laube presented in various places in the past years. Decisive is that Laube’s titling already indicates that he regards the entirety of the Lübeck exhibition as a solid whole, held together by internal and cross relationships.
Michael Laube also likes to call his works ”spatial concepts”. He means two things by this: First, he thereby painstakingly takes up selected givens of the spaces in question, taking them as an explicit starting point for his own works. Second, the formulation refers to the fact that the works not only respond to their surroundings, but also change the perception of these surroundings.
When preparing for the exhibition in Lübeck, the artist closely inspected the Overbeck Society; the conspicuously/inconspicuously masked beam construction of the roof attracted his special attention. This masking provided the initial inspiration for the sculptural form that can now be seen in the first room. The clarity of the composition, the beauty of the geometry, and the attraction that the transparent material exerts are qualities that allow the sculpture to stand on its own. But this is not all, by far: The measurements of the ”beams” are almost identical to those of the roof beams, and once one notices the connection between the work and the architecture of the hall, one will see the room itself with new eyes.
A dialectic unfolds between the two, in whose course their differences and similarities appear ever more clearly. Concealing and transparence, (supposed) constructive necessity and artistic freedom, the rule and its violation – these are some of the polarities paired off here that, at the same time, harmonize in the area of pure construction. Put another way: Their characteristics are fundamentally different, but both the roof masking and the sculpture are built, bolted, and precisely measured.
The situation is very similar in the second room. Here, too, Laube relates to the existing architecture and adds elements that alter it. Here, perhaps, the artist is closest to his background as a painter. Under the central overhead light, five wooden racks of equal size, painted gray, are placed in the relatively narrow hall, whose character is almost that of a passageway. Inserted into these racks, as onto shelves, are a total of 90 panes of Plexiglas onto which Laube has painted approximately ten-centimeter stripes in the most various colors, finished with a semi-transparent varnish.
As in the first room, this arrangement is also an immediate reflection of the local situation. The installation’s horizontal orientation, which results from the horizontal colored stripes, underscores the passageway quality. To grasp the work entirely, it is not enough to linger in front of it; the room is too narrow for this and the distance from the works too small. One has to walk past them and allow them to pass review, so to speak, if one wants to experience the full range of possibilities of the changing colors, the compositions arising from the overall view, and the play of light and shadow and of reflecting and matte surfaces.
For on the one hand, in his works, Michael Laube places great value on the effect of the material, on craftsmanlike sumptuousness and compositional consistence. On the other hand, there is always a subliminal something else, a kind of indefinable layer of meaning that points in the direction of immateriality: the angle of the light that modulates the works in different ways at different times of the day and the color values that unsuspectedly appear from certain perspectives when the reflections suddenly mix.
The light, the combination of opaque and broken colors, and the illusions created by the reflections and counter-reflections are also easily observed in Michael Laube’s work in the third room of the Overbeck Society. Here again, the work relates to the room – this time the row of windows in the upper part of the wall provides the blueprint for the dimensions of the individual modules that compose the work. The dominant wooden parquet also has its effect, though ex negativo: The intensely colored underlying plates in Laube’s work are the artist’s way of answering the flooring material, which otherwise would have reduced the effect of the fine materiality of his work – a design aspect that is further enhanced by the panels of color ”floating” about five centimeters over the parquet.
And thus this art relates antithetically to the given space. The band of windows clearly serves to illuminate the room; the parquet literally marks the solid ground under the visitors’ feet. The translucent Plexiglas panes of Laube’s floor sculpture, however, are apt to reduce the clarity of the lighting situation and thus also of the installation’s constructive appearance.
The resulting effect can best be compared to a room full of mirrors: there, too, a gap opens up between the architectural materiality and its perception by the sensorally confused viewer. Thus, here at the end of a tour through Michael Laube’s exhibition, a circle is completed in which art as such finds its way back to itself in a fundamental sense. It gives pleasure, it educates, it draws attention to the concealed, it criticizes, but first of all it questions what the normality we have in common is based on: the certainties of everyday life. That is the moment when creativity begins.
Ulrich Clewing
