michele drascek: 314/317/318

New paintings for the solo exhibition that takes place in Università Popolare degli Studi di Trieste in November 2007.

I am discussing an exhibition with an apparently enigmatic title: 314/317/318. These three numbers representing the title, are written on the same number of inventory plates applied on three pieces of the building property of the Trieste University, to be exact, on three doors, that open into three cosy, minute rooms of small dimensions where the exhibition was held. These rooms were renamed the "bright rooms", and are the venue of the project "Tracce fresche" (Fresh traces) that Michele Drascek had the courtesy to inaugurate. With this spatial metonymy that refuses to announce the content to indicate an anonymous container, to express more with this refusal, the exhibition satisfies its visitors. And with regards to this space (inventory, numbered), and as I said, cosy and minute, Drascek thought out and realized his intervention, which models on the course state of one road; from one room to another, from one door to another. This road passes through open landscapes where a sort of story evolves: the occupation of natural spaces by man and his final disappearance, due to a clear incapability to inhabit these places without destroying them or destroying oneself. The last image is one ironic identification profile that brings to mind the revealing and accusing guilty a natural but deformed creature, some kind of a dwarf with bloodshot eyes. He is accompanied by the legend Physica curiosa, because the tone is not apocalyptic but ironic and aloof, like the one of an entomologist and naturalist used to the freaks of nature [refer to post Physica curiosa]. The most astonishing among these seems to be the man himself. There are three time periods in the story, like there are three rooms that host them; Drascek adapts himself with flexibility in the spaces where he works and it is not a coincidence that his discussion seems to be eminently on the space, which appears to be more natural than architectonic. The first stop is the sky, or better, the tongues of brown, overcast sky, dominated by skies full of initial obscurity or already drowned in the darkness of the night, which is always dark bluish. Greyish diurnal sky, dark bluish nocturnal sky; It is never completely light or dark, nor ever the light falls from the heights to excavate the landscape. The earth’s profile is a silhouette, a strip of hills and apical shapes that appear to be more like turrets and bell towers in the distance rather than lampposts, as they turn out to be at a closer look. Drascek’s ability was to capture the vastness of natural landscapes on rather small size canvasses, 15 x 20 cm.: all is big and distant. The oil technique with the addition of plaster gives opacity to the atmosphere, and the use of a roller to trace lines in the sky, gives a sense of squall and precipitation still dense in the air. Even the elimination of colour, more than the drafting itself, gives a sense of origin and an echo in the distance. The lampposts: a sign of technology which does not appear as invasive as it perhaps should. Not even lattices or other much more monstrous symbols. Or perhaps the glance is already ironic till the charge for an environmental aggression like saying that the man’s work, despite being so pompous, is actually a banal scratch on the nature’s body and the only one to pay for his or hers arrogance is the man alone and not the world. The second stop, summarized in a Posthuman landscape, in fact announces itself as gaseous, mephitic scenery dense with vapours of the day after, but the only living form is a tender roe deer, a delicate form of life, and perhaps because of this, appears to be tougher. Here the irony is apparent. It was said for the idea of the fatal development, which structures the three moments of the exhibition: the spelling is scarcely allusive, recalled by lexical spies in the legends but could have easily been ignored, and Drascek does not do much to impose it. He wants to point it out with a programmatic sheet on the side with a declaration of purposes, but in the end his theme seems to be the indestructibility of the cosmos, its vastness, that does not care about the willingness of the freak of nature’s power, a dwarf of the third station, who is laughed at instead of handed over to our contempt. A poem about the intolerable silence of the horizon that closes in upon us, a glance from the blue heights that make the earth look small.
Marcello Monaldi