“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 1962. It wasn’t only the expansionary movements within modernist literature and art that took a great interest in the connection between machine and oracle, technology and fantasy.
Cédric Eisenring’s works are usually based on popular images that were originally printed, multiplied, seen and read on a massive scale, whether graphic prints from the 18th or 19th century or children’s books from the 1960s and ’70s. His visual language is characterized by its use of patterns, industrial forms, copies, repetitions, and samplings, and by abstract voids and traces of erasure, contrasted with motifs of baroque opulence and ornamental exuberance. The works’ figurative elements are suggestive and playful; often, they are repeated within the space of the image, swelling beyond their representative value like the fantasies of a child who repeatedly reads the same story. With his new prints on velvet, Eisenring has created ragged collages out of this formal “noise,” while the specific sensuous materiality of the velvet transports the paintings into a still and private world, as intimate and socially discrete objects of personal immersion.
The fundamental magic of reading literature lies in the realization that any world can open up from abstract symbols, and that any story can become unique, however popular. Eisenring’s collages open up a suggestive pictorial space that captures this experience, as a movement between processes of reproduction, migrations of forms, evocations of memory, and imaginative power.
– Leo Lencsés
Photos: Cedric Mussano