So, it’s wallpaper now, is it? After Neo-Geo painting and foil pictures, after plexiglass plates, PVC objects, here a scaffolding, there a wall, a bench, a cord and other barriers, after the total dramaturgical freedom of DJing for club cultures, after abstraction, geometry, computer animation, strict perception exercises, grid systems, after constructive-concrete art, signs and pictograms, Gerwald Rockenschaub subjected himself, in his recent exhibition in the Linz Palace Museum, to an examination or, in the show’s title, a reappropriation (allure/construct). The presentation had been precisely developed for the exhibition galleries, optimally tailored to this venue alone. Like all appearances of Rockenschaub’s compositions, it was masterful and nonchalant.

When he agreed to contribute a design for the sixth edition of the evn collection’s staircase series Wallpapers, we were all the more enthused and motivated, as well as challenged, to find a way of placing his work in relationship with another work from our collection.

In this case, what normally happens inside the space happens on the surface of the wall. Rockenschaub works not with objects here but with the graphical significance of written symbols. The pattern repeat, consisting of white letters on a black background, is about language. It’s important to note that the artist is working with various codes: with the code space, the code perception, the code grids and the code Wiener Schmäh, a distinctively Viennese type of black humor, as he said himself in an interview in the art magazine Weltkunst. This humor also flares up on his wallpaper. It permits various different interpretations. What initially looks simply like a kind of semantic ornament soon turns out to be loaded with not just visual significance but substantive meaning: you could read “urea,” a diamide of carbonic acid used to combat wrinkles, or alternatively “rea,” the feminine form of “guilty” in Latin. If you include printed and blank areas in the same visual frame, the English words “lure” and “real” appear. And once you really get into the swing of things, “allure” materializes, as in the title of the exhibition in Linz. This you could define as “tempo,” “charisma,” “glamor,” “charm,” or “temptation.” All of them rather pleasing nouns. And seduction, after all, is the specialty of this artist, who mixes a cocktail of conceptual and minimal art, pours it into your glass, and calls it “Sex for the Eyes.”

Brigitte Huck, 2023

Translation: Paul Richards