MILAN.- The large drawings entitled Morgengrauen (Crack of Dawn) show rectangular planes of alternating black ink and raw paper – ensembles of buildings in various stages of abstraction. Like stills from a film noir, one piece shows three pictures vertically stacked on a single sheet of paper; the other six show single compositions in landscape orientation on rolls of paper. The mood and intensity of expression vary in the series, which would seem to depict the same elevated view from two distances. A grim shiver of menacing fog frames the ensembles in all of the variations, except for one which shows the buildings as if denuded and in a ghostly process of decomposition. Here, the reduction of the architectural construction to lines and planes yields an abstract composition that evokes Concrete Art.

In 1974 the Swiss architect Rolf Keller published Bauen Als Umweltzerstörung (Building as Environmental Destruction), giving voice to what he calls a “gallery of ugliness”. When he describes contemporary construction, infrastructure and urban planning as a gruesome destruction of the environment, he is not only concerned with the ecological consequences but above all with the aesthetic destruction that he perceived in the architecture around him. With its Warholian cover in two colors, Keller’s publication – it is almost a manifesto – shows unvarnished photographs of the monotonous developments that had replaced traditional villages. David Weiss produced his large drawings in this same Swiss environment. They could represent suburban or peripheral urban development in any Western city characterized by the generic, interchangeable excrescences of modern architecture. These unhinged developments bear witness to a commercialized modernism and to what Keller sees as the hollow aesthetics of capitalist
exploitation.

David Weiss depicts these monotonous scenarios with an ambiguous gaze. Unlike the grand narratives of the famed post-war art of the time – the artists Harald Szeemann had included in Documenta 1972 – Weiss captures undefined, seemingly banal surroundings. His drawings express the melancholic beauty that he finds in such anonymous urban landscapes. Without taking a didactic stance, these drawings shed light on a shallow modernism that is no longer rooted in an ideology. The rectangular buildings could provocatively demonstrate how the painterly compositions of Concrete Art became blueprints for capitalist visions of urban planning, replacing one ideology with another. In his take on the grand but banal scenery that unfolds before him, Weiss seems to be fusing the irony of the popular underground comics artist Robert Crumb with romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s admiration of the sublime.

We cannot help admiring the way in which Morgengrauen captures the essence of the everyday and it makes us wonder. While Keller foresaw the damage caused by rampant real estate development, the unloved 1970s superstructures have since acquired the status of heritage sites. Their contested reception has become the subject of renewed debate and through the lens of historical distance, this has led to a reassessment, one that may already have been latent in the iterations of Morgengrauen.

Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen