Andria Dolidze

Banners are made to be seen. Whether zip-tied to fences or draped by ribbons, the banner is a declarative medium. Who, what, when, where, glazed with a little graphic design—this is the banner’s vocabulary. As days, weeks, months pass, seasons change and so do the advertisements, whether homemade or commercially scaled across the urban landscape. With a bit of the success of public recognition, you’ll have a relic of a memory on your hands.

Andria Dolidze walks through Düsseldorf collecting stickers, posters, and ornaments while taking photographs of architectural details, fences, and the like. He scavenges banners, too, along with errant pieces of jewelry or chains from a club in the same building as the Kunstverein. Buy something then lose something—these artifacts of a night can be brought into the daylight of art. Such fragments of the city, like pieces from a life that can’t stay still long enough for anything like its essence to be captured, have been collated by the artist into compositions akin to constellations. Titled Flâneur and inspired by Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (1927–1940), Dolidze’s new series of works are banners, but they refuse the legibility that such material generally needs in order to register. What does it look like, then? Prints on paper and canvas of a wrought-iron fence are laid over acrylic and oil paintings of hazy scenes with visible folds across the substrate. Grommets dot the surface, first helpfully (the corners), then aberrantly (an interruption of the picture). A red vinyl star twinkles but provides no guiding light. Looking at these works is a formulation of Benjamin’s urbane view that “the gaze of the alienated man […] is the gaze of the flâneur,” a figure who “seeks refuge in the crowd.” In the crowd of marks, textures, and weights of Dolidze’s Flâneur, the ending is just an oil painting of “THE END,” screwed.

– Paige K. Bradley