The works of the Austrian artist Christian Bazant-Hegemark deal with the combination of narrative painting and abstraction.
The paradoxical balance of presence and absence, of formulation and creation and of suggestion and meaning is present in all his works. The artist creates an attractive strife. It is challenging to interpret his work, because the viewer is often confused by the change of surface perception. The interplay between the figurative and the abstract may not be limited to one interpretation. Like the work “Your Thick Elephantine Yet So Delicately penetrable Skin” (2011), depicting a girl on a swing. The swing is fitted with a geometrically patterned background and is therefore connected with a surreal element.
Thus the fragmentary starts a communication with the narrative points and a complex dialogue develops. Nothing will be spoken. The figuration monopoly must not oppose the ideas of abstraction. The picture elements appear in fragmentary moments, which can avoid the provability of possible interpretations because they have nothing to prove. The images remain in an uncertain familiarity that seems to have no place. The composition occurs here as a measuring system, pushing whether neither the appropriateness of narrative nor the indulgence of abstraction in the foreground. What we encounter in the works of Christian Bazant-Hegemark, is the floating posture of the fragmentary: the vacuum of groundlessness.
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