Opening Speech: Galerie am Maxmonument
Aus der Eröffnungsrede von der Galeristin Julia Gradinaru (GaM)
“The universe of Anton Kammerl creates paradoxes of a world easy to recognize, but hard to define. His art is rather a recalling of an evocative experience, constructed with weirdness and strangeness, but over all, fascinating. “My philosophy is to show the female in its beauty and secret. Everything in our society seems to be revealed and made public. Therefore, the female, mainly shown in portraits, still remains my hope and my desire for the picturesque secret which is not translatable in words”. With a sensibility and an aesthetic which reminds of one of David Lynch reverical sequences, his photography seems to be collapsing under the power of seduction (often literally), the manners of his creation being rather uncomfortable. His models-characters are provided with a bursted beauty, painfully created by lights and colours, naked bodies and broken faces – a pictural carnation exhibited through brightness reflexions over the skin. The complexity of his imagination is provoking not only considering the visual result, as an image, but also as a haptic experience which Anton creates through the material of felt – a central material for many of his works. The felt is an insulating material, a material for warmth and heat which can retain the thermodynamic manifestation of energy, as a metaphor for the necessity of the female magic. Even though, when being touched, the felt’s structure feels rough, the whole construction creating an ambivalent message, which could cause both physical or subliminal irritations. Anton Kammerl glorifies the structure and completes the image, offering to his viewers the perfect scenery where the inner and darkest desires addresses to one from a parallel world. The photography of Anton Kammerl is similar to an haute-couture collection: sophisticated and elegant, but fabricated from a rough material. (..)”
