Robert Muntean | Artist in Residence

Robert Muntean: “New Works”

The Charim Factory in the former Ankerbrot factory in Vienna is an art space for art production, performance and events. Since April 2022 Robert Muntean has moved into the Factory and is using it as his studio. The change of location – Robert Muntean lives and works in Berlin – together with the possibility of working on several paintings at once in the spacious Factory, offers the opportunity to let an entire exhibition emerge from the pictures already distributed around the space. The alternation between finished paintings and those still in progress is an essential moment in the current painting process, and one that has concrete pictorial consequences. The title “New Works”, laconic as it may sound, thus points meaningfully to new elements and ways of working that promise an exciting exhibition.

Stylistic features of Robert Muntean’s painting include the visual sound that has its musical sources (among others) in the sound surfaces of Sonic Youth, who shaped electronic noise experimentally and combined it with melodic elements. The gestural manner of painting, in turn, owes much to the aggressive sound collages and expressive rhythms of industrial bands. These references can be seen as an acoustic milieu that finds its realisation in painting. Beyond this, however, it is also the contexts of content that motivated and determined those acoustic innovations which now feed back into the manner of painting and the composition of the pictures – such as the aesthetics of shock, the collage technique and the decomposition of figurative (melodic) pictorial motifs, whose intellectual foundations lie in the early avant-garde movements of Dada, Actionism and a modernism committed to experiment.

So what is new? A fleeting glance may rather recognise the familiar and notice shifts of emphasis in terms of colour, take note when larger areas, through a homogeneous application of paint, take on the appearance of objects and spatial elements, and then also find that a more marked distance arises between what is figuratively depicted and the viewers. What has changed is the pictorial representation, in that Robert Muntean uses elements of collage more strategically and interrogates his previous pictures by painterly means. As already mentioned, the generous spatial situation in the Charim Factory makes precisely this possible: weighing up and comparing his own pictures in order to take up motifs and develop them further in altered form, to follow the experiment more daringly alongside finished paintings, and to find new paths to tread by way of scattered traces.

And what does this mean with regard to the changed pictorial representation? Space-inducing pictorial elements and figurative outlines are not assembled into figures in space; instead, both become pictorial motifs on layered fields of colour. These in turn (collage technique!) are divided into zones which, some of them set hard against one another, have different functions within the picture as a whole: outlining a figure or, serving merely as a contour, revealing a section of an abstract composition. Perspectival line constructions that become flat cut surfaces through a homogeneous application of paint mark places that refer to underlying picture surfaces of which only fragments can be seen, while smaller parts of the picture are in turn placed together as though they had been made independently of one another and only then assembled into a collage on the canvas. The new works are multi-layered not only in painterly terms but also with regard to the mode of representation of different pictorial strategies. Paradoxically, this also makes the new works more open, and the viewers are drawn more actively into the play of visual and discursive offerings. Kurt Kladler