SALZBURG.- With the group exhibition Pointe, Gerlind Zeilner brings together a series of artistic positions that explore the boundaries between abstract and figurative forms of representation. An exploration of visibility, recognizability and processes of alienation is located at the blank spaces of verbal definability. What the individual positions have in common is not only the formal possibilities offered by colors on media, but also the interweaving of motifs of everyday experience, traces and legacies. The Pointe, understood here as a system of a sudden meaningful realization, examines in a loose, almost anecdotal way culmination points and connections of initially unrelated elements. In this, the works also prove to be continuous layerings of existential and seemingly lightly conceived content. Somewhere in the supposed contrasts between form and content, the conditions of (painterly) representation intermingle, oscillating between forms of non-verbalizable connotations and also enabling contradictory levels of meaning.

Gregor Eldarb's (*1971) film A Seed is Planted confronts the viewer with a world of forms pulsating and seemingly independently and randomly forming surfaces. Inspired by Esther Leslie's theories on liquid crystals, the images in the experimental film are situated between equally fluid and crystalline motifs. The completely analog, yet digital-looking images portray the interplay of ferrofluid oils and magnetic fields that form bizarre, seemingly alive structures. Liquid crystals like these are the technology behind digital displays, flat screens and computers. Inside screens, they are an essential part of the visual shaping of information. The fields of form that appear so mechanically organic are ultimately accomplices in the creation of images and shape, thanks to their seemingly non- relational ability to move, visualized perception in the digital age.

Bernhard Frue's (*1968) multimedial approach encompasses painting, drawing, photography and installation. The hand-drawn grid of the exhibited drawings gives the impression of images from print media. The media-specific quality of the printing process, which creates replicas at relatively high speed and precision, is countered by Frue's almost meticulously meditative work with ink. The detail-obsessed result of his painting or drawing process thus raises questions about the duplication of information and the functioning of an economization of images. Forms of appropriation can also be found, for example, in MarsMexSmokeRepeat – a painting purchased in Mexico City that serves him as an gesture for dealing with artistic aspects of duplication and repetition.

In his classically painterly treatment of items of clothing and objects such as shoes and bags Frue explores the boundaries between painting and object art. The objects, covered in thick layers of paint and no longer painted, but colored, counteract and exaggerate processes of painterly representation as well as processes of dyeing textiles.

The works of Marcus Weber (*1965) combine seemingly contradictory concepts and themes from classical painting, comics and video game culture. In his small-format paintings, landscapes painted with an pastose application of paint and an almost impressionistic gesture meet zombies from computer games and grotesque depictions of human figures.

In terms of both, form and motif, Weber explores aspects of the decomposition and deconstruction of landscapes and anthropomorphic figures. In the large-format paintings, too, the world of classical painting meets an aesthetic similar to that of comics and digital culture. In imaginative figures and from the flat surface, Weber constructs content that opens up painterly depths through the narrative. Graphic elements and linear shape markings both stylize and animate his motif worlds.

The works of Haruko Maeda (*1983) combine technical precision with profound reflection on contrasts and transitions. Her garbage bouquets, flower arrangements made from painted buckets and waste, are exemplary of her exploration of beauty and ugliness, life and transience and specifically emphasize environmentally critical elements. By questioning value and classifications, Maeda reveals the contradictions in seemingly everyday objects and shifts their meaning into new, often humorous contexts. In doing so, she draws on art historical genres and discourses, links Christian-European culture with Japanese concepts of life and plays with the irony behind supposedly weighty themes.

Maeda thus not only shows the poetry of the ephemeral, but also the subtle connections between cultural symbols, social structures and personal stories such as when an injured Japanese river god becomes an ambassador for endangered nature. Her works range from photorealistic detail to abstract variations, creating a high density of information that challenges and captivates the viewer.

Karine Fauchard (*1976) devotes her work to the transitions of meaning and indeterminacy through the intermediate fields of the finished and the unfinished. In the group of works Swan series she collects paint leftovers, scraps and fragments of earlier painting processes, which are collaged onto Dibond panels to form new pictorial compositions. These relics of painterly genesis, supposedly meaningless waste products, open up, like forgotten syllables, to the interspaces of meaning. Fouchard sees processes of fragmentation and isolation as productive components of her painterly practice.

This is also evident in the works that refer to the legendary collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. In doing so, Fouchard explores both the material and emotional dimensions of collecting. Fouchard interweaves insights into the intimate world of two great collectors with sensitive studies exploring materiality and processuality in painting. The porcelain vessels applied to unprimed canvases in porcelain glaze invite the viewer to question the codes and techniques of painting. They create a dialog about the medium in its emotional, aesthetic and receptive experiences.

Martina Steckholzer's (*1974) artistic practice also oscillates between abstraction and figuration. The starting point for her most recent works are dioramas from the Natural History Museum in Vienna, whose morbid visual worlds she transforms into paintings. Steckholzer makes the tipping points of representability, similarity and alienation the central theme of her work. In her conceptual and at the same time poetic practice, she infuses her very personal painterly translation of the dioramas and traces the 'remnants' of content that can be preserved despite mediatic transformation. Her works are characterized by a formal reduction and a minimalist approach that opens up emotional and narrative spaces. Steckholzer's works thus deconstruct existing forms and transform them into new, subjective visual worlds that reflect the relationship between reality and perception.

A central focus of Gerlind Zeilner's (*1971) work is the constant play with the proportionality of abstraction and figuration. In loosely gestural, yet always precise expressions, her paintings elude clear attributions. In her ongoing series of portraits of colleagues from her personal surroundings, abstract ideas of real perception and supposedly contradictory strands of similarity are combined in sessions painted in real time. She also casts a similar portrait gaze on the objects in her immediate environment, painterly emphasizing their personal character. Depictions of everyday objects serve her to explore painterly-poetic interpretations of reality in both the current and the commonplace. In doing so, she expands the boundaries of possible banalities and examines the extent to which supposedly neutral objects open up metaphorical levels of meaning in the context of their gestural appropriation. It also seems as if the fragile, delicate, sometimes fading painting style tames the uncertainties of painting in the face of a possible inability to represent - Zeilner celebrates these possible ambivalences. - Niklas Koschel