META META. Melzl/Jacob/Haas/Erdelmeier/Cardone

The exhibition META META brings together the artistic positions of Stephan Melzl, François Jacob, Florian Haas, Thomas Erdelmeier, and Barbara Cardone, all of whom engage with societal realities in diverse ways, placing human existence at the center of their exploration. Through their works, they create metaphors for the present.

STEPHAN MELZL’s small wooden panels depict imagery that resonates with a disquieting silence and an aura of mystery. By intertwining Melzl’s own visual discoveries with references to art history, the paintings open up a realm of meaning that resists straightforward interpretation despite a thoughtful arrangement of visual elements. Their allegorical nature allows the images to serve as mirrors for inner states and fantasies.

FRANÇOIS JACOB constructs a cosmos of absurdities, drawing on references from carnival, various cults, rituals, caricature, and theater. Through a puzzling assembly of objects and figures—often depicted in a state of introspection or with strangely contorted expressions—grotesque, bizarre scenes emerge that form poignant parables of the Conditio humana in their absurdity.

The landscapes and nature images of FLORIAN HAAS appear like enchanted fairy-tale worlds. The backdrop for these peacefully seeming parallel realms consists of allegories reflecting societal conditions. Haas designs his mushroom worlds as portraits or stages them in figurative compositions. With an anthropomorphic perspective, human traits and metaphors for social coexistence can be discerned in his mushroom images.

THOMAS ERDELMEIER’s fantastical imagery, characterized by vibrant opaque colors, invites an immediate immersion into these enigmatic, sometimes eerie visual realities through their dynamic composition and multifaceted narrative style. In extreme perspectives and layered spaces, imagination and observation merge into a thought pool reflecting an increasingly complex societal system and the role that individuals may play within it.

In BARBARA CARDONE’s paintings, the themes of memory and imagination take center stage. She attempts to give presence to the moment between the original and the present, which is subject to limited temporality, within her art. This distance between two events in the space-time continuum remains elusive to immediate concreteness. In the restoration of an image from memory, signs of the illusory become visible, revealing the inevitable betrayal that images exert on memory. The hyperrealism in her works intensifies the feeling of losing oneself in indefinable in-between spaces.
(Miriam Walgate, 2015)