FREQUENCY

A SOLO EXHIBITION OF FANT WENGER

FREQUENCY, a solo exhibition of Fant Wenger, organized by ITSLIQUID Group, will be presented in Rome from December 06 to December 20, 2021, at Medina Art Gallery. The opening will be on December 06, 2021 from 06PM to 09PM.

In Fant Wenger‘s paintings, nature and technology usually collide in a rugged and momentous way. Not only is the chosen spectrum of colors powerful, but the artist also places railway wagons, telephone poles, parabolic antennas, or even a satellite in the landscape. They are surrounded by trees with extensive branches and undergrowth. Powerful and often bare, they cross the pictorial space. The paintings show a distinct dynamism, which is intensified by the size of the canvases.

Light plays an important role in Fant Wenger’s painting. He selectively dips individual elements into glistening light, which in various works spreads out over the entire picture surface, illuminating it supernaturally and running through the room like jack-o’-lanterns.

Which sparks jump here and what is sent or received in this world full of riddles? No casual or linear connection can be read. The artist gives hints through the title, which can nourish suspicions, but without giving a real interpretation. He does not leave any of his compositions to chance but intensively deals with their meaning and implementation, until he finally manages to reproduce all his thoughts in a harmonious interplay on the canvas.

“It’s all about Frequency”. Since 2016 Fant Wenger has been working on an extensive group of works which includes paintings as well as installations, performances, and videos. The motif is reproduced in photographic realism, but the use of ambiguous perspectives and strange juxtapositions as well as this energetic colorfulness suggest an imagined or even dreamed reality. Here, nature and technology sometimes collide rudely; the whole thing is underlaid with music that changes from spherical to disturbing to threatening. What information, perhaps even certainties, the artist is chasing after, remains unclear; that the search will continue, it seems certain.

Perhaps it is not so much something magical that captivates us in these images, but rather a resonance of our own body; a response that the artist creates in us with his choice of colors. Warm, earthy red tones, a radiant yellow that is light to the point, contrasted with soft turquoise, shrill green, or night-dark aubergine. Red dominates almost all paintings, and where it doesn’t, it’s a warm yellow. The artist does not use color to fill the form, rather it is created from light and color: however naturalistic the representation may be, the expression of the color overlays the physical form.

Wenger creates a kind of “third reality” in his works, in which he depicts a material world, and suggests hidden meanings. And so the topic of frequency in the sense of repetition is related to archetypal experiences: memory, loss, belief in the future, destruction, hope. Much remains in suspense, in an inspiring suspension that sounds like open spaces for thought, but does not provide any final answer.