Photography and Art Exhibition Review | Brian Rope
Eva van Gorsel and Manuel Pfeiffer | Congruent - Incongruent
M16 Artspace | Until 21 November 2021
Eva van Gorsel is a photographer who uses numerous diverse techniques and approaches to create varied, interesting imagery - her background in environmental sciences and scientific photography always there. Her imagery here does not disappoint. As usual they are excellent artworks, pleasing to look at, contemplate and think about.
Manuel Pfeiffer is a painter who uses an extensive range of materials, including acrylics, pencils, charcoals and much more. His works here are of mixed media, including acrylics, pencils, even plaster of Paris. They are equally pleasing to explore.
The gallery sheet informs visitors that these artists feel our lives have changed, that harmony has been disrupted by climate change and pandemics globally. Few would disagree. The artists suggest many of us have been striving for balance more consciously - in our friendships and workplaces, and in how we interact with our environment.
Here was their starting point to create an exhibition addressing congruence (in agreement or harmony) and incongruence. The artists have creatively investigated their concept, exploring balance, harmony and disharmony, symmetry and asymmetry.
They have also used the mathematical concept of congruence – figures, identical in form, coinciding exactly when superimposed. In geometry, two figures or objects are congruent if they have the same shape and size, or if one is a mirror image of the other.
So, in these works, we see reflected, rotated and translated shapes and lines overlaid on a variety of landscapes. Whilst art lovers generally enjoy the aesthetics of congruent images, they also do not mind some tension – it keeps us looking and exploring the artwork.
The depicted landscapes are from diverse Australian places, including New England, Lake Burley Griffin, Kosciusko, Cocoparra National Park, the Flinders Ranges, and the Devils Marbles. They include mountains and seas, sunrises and night times. Some include circular shapes that may be either the sun or the moon – or something else?
Van Gorsel has an interest in how colour and geometry shape landscapes. She examines moods created by warm and cold colours, the direction of light and how it changes, transitioning colours painted on skies or reflected in water. Here, her diptychs are congruent - despite focussing on contrasting concepts. They are displayed as pairs of works side by side. All the images are based on photography. Each panel is the same size, each is a pigment ink print on archival paper.
Her Mountain Ranges diptych shows the same scene overlaid with the same triangles and lines – each a reflection of the other, one warm toned, the other cool.
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MountainRanges i & ii © Eva van Gorsel |
And the two images in her Lake Lights diptych are again reflections of each other, except that the circle in each varies in density or hue.
Lake Lights i & ii © Eva van Gorsel
Pfeiffer’s works are, on the one hand, based on
incongruence: every diptych, in itself partly congruent, is different in
technique and the materials used reflect the wide variety of possibilities available
to artists. On the other hand, all works are of the same size (some in portrait,
others in landscape format) and mounted the same way, in the mathematical sense
of the word congruent.
The left-hand side of his Lake Burley Griffin diptych is a monochromatic version of the coloured and inverted right hand side.
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Lake Burley Griffin © Manuel Pfeiffer |
View From Cocoparra is presented in an analagous way but is much more graphic with delightful contour lines and a simple and subtle tree.
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View From Cocoparra © Manuel Pfeiffer |
Two sets of works play off each other perfectly. These artists have again produced a fine exhibition as they did with their previous joint show Facets in 2020.
This review was published in the Canberra Times of 20/11/21 here and on the author's blog here.