Fritz Panzer - The Walk In Drawing

Fritz Panzer relieves objects of his immediate reality of their significations and shows them in their half present - half absent nature.

The chair and the chair: If you place a wire object by Fritz Panzer next to its „real“ model it seems to be from a different world. What ? The wire object or its model? That is very hard to say at the moment of viewing. We have two objects in front of us, which do not complete nor exclude each other, who are „no more or not yet the Other“ (Roland Barthes)

Within the descriptiveness of the tangible and its inconceivability, words like brown, hard, smooth, and such as mysterious, odd, neutral are in opposition to each other, and while one would be ready to attribute the qualities mysterious, odd, neutral just as well to a chair of our immediate real world, the linguistic transfer in the opposite direction must fail: the artist has relieved the object of adjectives i.e. additions, and liberated it of the weight of certain meanings. As we thus forfeit a language, the things themselves in turn “enter the melancholy of their own collapse” (Roland Barthes).

In the 1970ies Fritz Panzer created sculptures that were replicas of furniture and objects on a scale of one to one. At that time the artist already concerned himself with objects of his surrounding reality and detached the bed, kitchen table, sideboard, hardwood floors of their usability and draws our attention to their peculiarity, form, their sculptural quality.
The gaze on these now unfunctional, self-sufficient things is becoming emptied, drained, seeing is becoming cognition without recognition, pure vision.
Unpretentiously, they present themselves such as they are and irritatingly, we have to discover that the things have an existence of their own, even the more so, the less they let themselves be handled, controlled, designated by us.
With the cardboard sculptures the artist examined the objects focusing on their volume, in his drawings –drawing being another central means of expression in Fritz Panzers artistic work besides painting- it is their shape. He follows outlines that can be seen and outlines “that are only visible, but not there” (Hans-Joachim Müller), he duplicates, erases them, deletes them halfway and thus shows the objects in their present-absent nature.
By the extension of the drawing into three dimensions, the creation of the „walk-in drawing“, our impression is reinforced to be dealing with objects dwelling an intermediate world.
New spaces come into being, in which the artist makes an escalator, scooter, stepladder or desk grow out of the world and likewise into it, holding them poised between visibility and invisibility.
The psychoanalyst Georg Gröller characterizes Fritz Panzers work as „progressive practice of renunciation, as work on the disentanglement from the passions of the ego with all its purposes, intentions and meanings, as constantly renewed intent to merge with the mere being of the object by identification and to suspend the separation into which the experience of loss and the resulting formation of the wish presentation have introduced us in the first place”.
The issue at hand is renunciation, a „Non-will-to-possess“, where “desire still irrigates the Non-will-to-possess by this perilous movement” (Barthes) and at the same time implies a wantless oblivion of speech. In other words: „ For the notion of non-will-to-possess to be able to break with the system of the Image-repertoire, I must manage…to let myself drop somewhere outside of language, into the inert, and in a sense, quite simply, to sit down“ (Barthes) On what ? On the chair of course. (sh/ca)

Interviewee: Fritz Panzer
Artworks by: Fritz Panzer

Copyright info: The audio and video recording has been made with personal permission of the artist.
Licensing: 0
Language(s): German, English
Subtitles: German, English
Producer: KA21 GmbH / CastYourArt
Production crew: rakete BB, Wolfgang Haas, Ewa Stern, I.J. Biermann
Production country: Austria, Vienna