Deserters 
Solo exhibition at Teile/2o46
2021

Light slowly fades from burnt vanilla to a sweet grey-blue. Clouds like raw cotton soaking up a watery ink. There is a clicking sound and wind howls past the flanks of the train as the digital clock is totally wrong. Both hour and minutes disagree with the setting sky. The train carriages have been deserted. Representation deserted into abstraction.

The clock that has a different time to the sky is like the reference that has a different time to the final artwork. Is abstract art an empty train on a closed loop with no final station? The practice of open ended and exuberant production with uninhibited material consequences. Thinking about the criticism of abstract art as decorative is doubly frustrating because it presumes the deprecation of decorative and abstract art.

Esra Nagel intentionally departs from and abstracts her reference to paintings by Leonor Fini and dissolves a collective memory of traveling by trains. Both Leonor and Esra focus on the interior surface of the train rather than the potential landscape to be seen from the window. The windows are blocked out making the train carriage an incubator for erotic privacy.

Trains literally are modernism.

These tactile surfaces of history come from another kind of memory as the brain fog of queer ancestors condenses onto the walls as grubby shimmers. Here is the evidence of a transitional time when traveling by train was still an opulent leisure activity. A time when modernist engineering and hygiene hadn’t yet cleaned up the swirling patterns of pre-industrial decorative art. The negation of the train window also begs the question, when did paintings stop being fake windows? The bench invites the visitors to sit down as they become the only passengers on this train from objectivity to deviant revisioning.

The clouds are soaking wet inside.

Plugged into the train’s plug beneath a small sign saying ‘not for public use’, the phone sucks up the juice and charges gradually. Stromsparend paintings, economic in the application of the paint. She touches the surface lightly, keeping a distance. The works share their energy like migrating birds sleeping in shifts. When the birds at the front get tired they fall to the back. The train‘s driver is hidden from sight, it almost seems self driving.

Tracks that the wet paint and brush marks follow. Holding, driving, alighting. 

Text by Tommy Camerno