DRAWINGS MADE FROM THE ASHES

Burned wood, charcoal, ashes, a drawing on the wall; the ghost presence of a familiar object, or the echo of a body. The solo exhibition “Drawings from the ashes” by artist Julia Frank presents a series of sculptural pieces carved out of exact replicas of the iconic coat stand produced by Gebrüder Thonet in 1905, an object of everyday use by the legendary industrial manufacturers populating the modern Viennese imaginary: cafés and domestic interiors. Six bentwood beech hooks, curled and designed to accommodate coats, hats, and umbrellas. Bentwood furniture is elastic, lightweight and solid, flexible, and resistant to stress. In the work of Julia Frank the components of the coat stand are taken apart, recombined, and altered. In the piece Troia (Bitch), 2022, one of the six curled arms of the coat stand has been detached from its corpus and turned 180 degrees upside down around its axis; the surface of the entire object has been burned till carbonization. Symmetry is interrupted and the serpentine-like shape becomes a sinister claw or a coil. The turning of the arm-hook upside down frustrates the possibility of engaging with the object in its original function. From this unnaturally oblong arm the head of a viper, an add-on, sneaks out.The sculpted snakehead, the add-on, the only alien part, takes the work to another dimension, with humor and horror at once.Taking a closer look at the burned wood of the sculpture we see a word engraved out on the central tubular stand: manipulus. It points at something tactile, it seems to ask to be touched, moved, lifted; it asks us to wrap our five fingers around it, squeeze it or choke it. The beginning of disintegration by means of burning the wood opens up an ambiguous position; it speaks not only of an object but also of a body in distress or in transformation. It seems as if a feeling of disquiet was already hidden somewhere inside the object, waiting to be unmasked, like a pun exploiting the different possible meanings of a word–beech, bitch, troia. But also a personal story of affects, or an age old story. The story of the cursed snake that lured mankind to be condemned to mortality: a narrative for the falling of a world. It’s the voice coming out of a log that is soon to be turned into a puppet-boy; not flesh yet, but already burning, feeling pain and lamenting, even before being born. The work addresses a form of intimacy, it turns onto itself as a body. Its skin, the ultimate membrane that separates it from the world, has been scarred by the shock of combustion. When our world starts to collapse after a trauma, the objects that surround us lose their meaning. We recognize threats and fears in formerly familiar surroundings. Words are not available to us as they were before; they have become inadequate. The work reinvents a language from the ashes. A post-traumatic subject is “deemed to have both the most and the least expertise over its significance – least because trauma definitionally dissolves the rules of continuity that stabilize self-knowledge over time and most because no one else can witness one’s own story.”* The carbonized beech becomes a charcoal for starting to draw again and be intimate, personal, to speak with an “I”. It leaves a trace on the wall; it becomes performative. It is a leap out of a tempo frozen in repetition and becomes a singularity, vertical; a column for connecting the floor to the ceiling; a feeling; a story to make sense out of the ashes. * Lauren Berlant (2001) Trauma and ineloquence, Cultural Values, 5:1, 41-58, DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367220