Ornament and enlightenment do not necessarily contradict each other. Christian Mayer, with his interest in the history of civilization, unearths historical images, yet does not expose them directly, but sends the beholder on a detour by covering his found objects with a decorative veil – a filter that delays the transmission of knowledge, which is the artist’s actual intention. Often, the material is presented in ornamental arrangements, as a large picture in space or – on EVN’s Christmas card for 2008 – as a dark silhouette against gold ground. Under the title of El Dorado, he relied on panoramic wallpaper from the nineteenth century, when the non-European continents were suppressed by colonialism. The pattern showing exuberant plant motifs refers to the legendary place in South America, which in indigenous myths was associated with the search for gold. Later on, “El Dorado” was generally used to describe a place of utopian desire. Yet the exotic landscape’s beauty cannot conceal the suffering and destruction the search for gold entailed.

The expansive work acquired for the evn collection in 2010 consists of 450 Polaroids and also leads us into the realm of Latin American history and legend. However, the first encounter with the work does not reveal what it is about: one is confronted with grid-structured panels and a flood of colorful images. Sometimes one can see the photographs, sometimes their reverse sides, and one assumes that an archival order might be behind this presentation. Indeed the pictures are grouped thematically, bearing such titles as Hunters, Fire, or Colonial Interior.

The Polaroids were taken in 1986. They document the shooting of the monumental film The Mission by Roland Joffé, starring Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons. Ennio Morricone’s opulent soundtrack has become famous. This history film deals with an experiment of the Jesuits, who in the seventeenth century wanted to establish a Catholic “state” in the Paraguayan jungle that was to be put under the protection of Portuguese troops in order to convert the native Guarani people and integrate them into a Christian community. The project ended with a massacre. Christian Mayer arranged the pictures in such a way that all direct clues connected with the film’s shooting (cameras, actors, technical equipment, etc.) are hidden. Thus an interplay has been created between the invisible and the obvious. Yet also what is visible of the tropical world engulfs a mystery: for an entire village in Colombia was relocated for the making of The Mission.¹ Thus the question of authenticity arises on several levels: what world do we believe to see? Meyer’s work addresses not only history and the construction of pictorial content, but also the issue of historical media as such: this applies both to the unusual and fashionable form of illusionist wall decoration – the fabric wallpaper with its large-sized pictures – and the medium of Polaroids, whose production has meanwhile been discontinued. Soon we will have to explain what was so unusual and innovative about these small pictures in artificial colors.

Wolfgang Kos, Heike Maier-Rieper, 2011 (translation: Wolfgang Astelbauer)

1)  In a conversation the artist mentioned that Joffé had originally been looking for certain types of villages in the area of the Iguazu Falls (on the border between Brazil and Argentine), but had not been able to find them anymore and had therefore switched to a Colombian village.