David Hominal
Through The Windows
Exhibition June 7 – October 19, 2013
Opening June 6, 2013 from 6 pm
An installation of four silkscreen prints and a sound piece, as well as a new publication, Through the Windows.
David Hominal manipulates images that often come from his personal archive, from the press or more largely images with historical or political references. He proceeds by free associations that mix flashbacks that are as much linked to current events as to intense personal experiences or to his literary and cinematographic keenness. He makes freely figurative or abstract painting. The subjects are treated in a graphical manner, in a rapid and immediate style that borrows more from photography, advertisement and the press than from painting itself.
The framing and the simplified and efficient compositions offer these images a vividity that serves as a critical stance, as an indicator of the violence and nonsense that invade our perception of society, and of the world that surrounds us: signs of power, of political decline and of social difficulties and misery. For David Hominal painting is not merely a question of aesthetics, a know-how, a uniquely artistic gesture or the expression of a pathos, but rather the most direct, spontaneous and striking translation of a sharp consciousness of absurdity and violence.
These productions are linked to the years that the artist spent in Berlin and to his transfer to Belgrade. Having had to hurriedly leave behind his Berlin atelier, David Hominal took pictures of its walls that he has kept as a recollection of his work: notes and collages for future productions. The edition carried out and produced by the Centre d‘édition contemporaine, a digitally printed publication, will assemble images of these atelier walls, sketches, drawings, collages, found images, a body of notes that nourish his painted work, objects and installations. This publication will also gather the reproductions of « bar notes and receipts » as well as several groups of paintings. These « bar notes » are in reality simple bills from bars in Berlin. Together they constitute a precious notebook full of encounters, conversations, exchange of memories and information. They represent reminiscences of the Berlin nights but also bear traces of his personal and intellectual thoughts, of his literary and artistic references. These notes and many small drawings retrace his life in Berlin, his encounters in the bars of his neighbourhood with the artists, immigrants, workers, nonconformists, creatives, shady characters with whom he spent time for months. More than 52 notes on paper, pictures of the walls of his Berlin atelier (2010-2012) considered to be working material and several reproductions of paintings taken from the series Through the Windows (2009), 320 x 200 cm Part I and II, Nature Morte in Front of the Window I-IV (2011), WINDOWS & ANANAS I-V (2011), Ni le soleil ni la mort… (2011), From Desmond (2012), Cigarette paper & gouache (2012), Leonardo da Vinci & Chocolate Paper (2012), ONION & BREAD and REPRESSION (2012)… are gathered, layed out and mounted in a new publication Through the Windows, digital print on RecyStar paper 100 g/m2, 21 x 28 cm, colours, cover in black Balacron, 350 g/m2 with a red gold pressing for the title, sewn and glued binding, 164 pages, an edition of 270, of which 10 are numbered and signed and contain original drawings. Photography: David Hominal, graphic design: Niels Wehrspann in collaboration with David Hominal, printing: PCL, Lausanne, binding: Schumacher AG, Schmitten. Edition of the Centre d’édition contemporaine, Geneva, 2013.
The second act of our collaboration with David Hominal is the production of a new series of four large size coloured silkscreen prints on HP Matte Litho-realisticpaper 270 g/m2, 73 x 130 cm, an edition of 10 copies, 2 H.C. and 3 A.P. signed, dated and numbered, printed in Geneva and edited by the CEC. This series testifies of the first impressions of the artist as arriving in Belgrade and of his feelings towards this city unknown to him and still stuck in an Eastern block atmosphere. These silkprints are an echo to the publication.
For his exhibition at the CEC, David Hominal will propose a sound environment that will accompany his silkscreen prints. This new sound piece will also mix readings by David Hominal of all the textual parts of his publication Through the Windows, from the beginning to the end and the real sounds of the place: the creams of the cats represented in the silkscreen prints as well as Jean-Sébastien Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” played by Glenn Gould.
