MAJA MARX - CREASE

The debut exhibition by Maja Marx at the Outlet Project Room, titled Crease, is a study of the relation between text, surface and depth and the properties of the straight line in the drawing process. Using for the most part thread to construct taut lattices on simple painted fields, the works refer to the minimal grids of standard stationary paper, and serve to position the object of paper as terrain or space onto paper as surface.

The depicted pages are furrowed and creased as if they have been discarded after use. In this, crumpling an inscribed page or a note initiates a collapse of legibility and a simple interference in which distant points are suddenly positioned close to another – the grid is disrupted and can now be read as a cartographic index of a topological terrain. Crease compels a conversation between geometry and topology. With the painting Heap (above), the warped and crumpled text evokes an imagined flatness in one’s desire to read what is now an impossible text. In this manner the painting plays between looking and reading, the painterly mark and the mark of writing, between the flat surface of the canvas and the mimetic depth of the painting. In its bundling, the illegible text and crumpled page becomes a mountainous landscape in which the authority of text and the distanced position of the Cartesian reader is challenged by a now embodied participant-viewer that can walk the terrain of the topological with his eyes.

Opening Saturday 20 March at 14:00, ongoing until 10 April 2010.