Michael Ornauer: The Quiet Order of Things

Michael Ornauer — The Quiet Order of Things

It is worth looking beyond the edge. To set out in search of where a work ends, but also where it began.

Whenever one visits Michael Ornauer’s studio, idyllically situated in a villa at the edge of the Vienna Woods that has been gently worn by time, a new order reveals itself. Nothing is where it was the last time. And yet nothing is accidental. Here in the studio, thoughts and brushstrokes collide. Gradually, works emerge where at first there was only chaos. Michelangelo spoke of freeing the figure from the stone. The painter, too, must first find his work within the material. His space of possibilities is the studio. After years of intensive creative work, Michael Ornauer has now begun to tidy up this studio. Yet tidying up does not create a final order. Rather, it brings something new into being. And so, the approximately twenty new works in this exhibition have emerged from this process of ordering.

The new works are assemblages, and their material is the studio. Brushes, tubes of paint, spatulas, the painting board from the evening session, an old landscape sketch. Above all, however, they are earlier works themselves, cut apart and reassembled. What once seemed complete becomes material once again. In this way, each of these works becomes a kind of artist’s portfolio, without the need to turn its pages. Earlier states do not lie one behind another, but exist simultaneously within the picture plane. The works are snapshots of decades of artistic practice, in which past and present merge into a new pictorial state.

There is also a connection here to the history of collage and assemblage. Ever since Picasso and Braque expanded the boundaries of the image by incorporating newspaper, wallpaper, and other materials, and ever since Dada and Kurt Schwitters elevated everyday objects to the status of artistic material. Ornauer turns this movement inward. While historical collage brought the outside world into the picture, he makes his own pictorial history the material of the present. The studio becomes an archive, the archive becomes a collection of materials, and the collection of materials becomes an image once again.

The most intriguing aspect of these works lies along their boundaries. The frames are equal actors. They do not merely contain the pictures, but intervene in them, introduce resistance and shift the boundary between image and object. In this, Ornauer connects to a long art-historical tradition. In the context of winged altarpieces, for example, image content, frame and architecture were already inseparably connected. With the modern era, the detachable strip frame increasingly became established, defining the painting as an independent, transportable object. The original frame was often lost when a work was sold. In modernism, artist-designed frames finally received their due attention. Edgar Degas was among the first to experiment with the white, unadorned edge and was allegedly so jealous of his frames that he would take back paintings from friends who had had them reframed. Postmodernism subsequently dispensed with the frame to a large extent. But Michael Ornauer understands its power. The frame can ennoble a work, but it can just as easily overwhelm it and throw perception off course. And so Ornauer takes the frame into his own hands. Years ago, the artist began either finishing his works with frames he constructed himself or conceiving them in such a way that they are complete even without a frame.
The new works are more intimate than any previous series by Ornauer. Not only because the glimpse behind the scenes lifts the veil on the making of the paintings, but above all because these works speak of his own failures.

Of rejection, cutting apart and reordering. The pendulum movements of the creative process become visible, while remaining partially concealed from view. Even on the reverse sides, facets and surprises are hidden.

Perhaps this is where the true quiet order of things lies. Ornauer does not tidy his studio in order to establish a definitive order. He makes order itself the material of his art. The past is not brought to a close, but remains available. Once again, this raises the old, open question: When is a work complete? The artist directs the process; he determines the order. A small ordering of the world, originating in the studio. And so the exhibition itself becomes a frame: for looking back, taking stock and making space for what comes next.

Paula Watzl