R Dostal Selected Works2017 Vexer Verlag, St. Gallern, 1990-2008 Former Car Dealer, Castle Ludwig...

R DostalSelected Works

Schichten

2017 Vexer Verlag, St. Gallern, www.vexer.ch

Schichten – Arbeiten auf Papier

2017 Kunstraum Kreuzlingen

Works on Paper

2014 Galerie Bleisch, Arbon

Painting on Burlap Cloths


Black and White, Burlap


works on paper


1990-2008 Former Car Dealer, Castle Ludwig Binswanger,

Kunstraum Kreuzlingen, Galerie Bleisch, 14-1 Galerie, Wuhan Art Museum

Emulsion Wall Paint, Acryl, Paint on Burlap, Hard Faser

Black-White

Black-White 1990-2008 Former Car Dealer

2008 Neuwerk Kunsthalle

Staged Painting, Layers, Performance, Roof Battens, Cardboard, Acrylic Glass, Videocameras, Projector, Performance

Reconstruction Island – Translusion

Reconstruction Island – Translusion2008 Neuwerk Kunsthalle

Bamboo, Paint, Transparent Plastic Sheets, Dough, Acrylic Glass, Videocameras, Projector

2008 Wuhan Art Museum

Layers

2008 Arcitekt Ryf School Kreuzlingen

Painted Glass, Dough, Quart Unit, Light

Lightinstallation, Slow Down

Painted Glass, Dough, Quart Unit, Light

Lightinstallation, Slow Down

2008 Arcitekt Ryf School Kreuzlingen

2007 Herdern, Oberthurgau

Beams, Be Reflective Floor, Painted Hardboard in Front of Glass

Schichten


Silk Screen on Aluminium, Video, Monitor, Magnifying Screens, Phone As Speaker, Intro Song High Noon by Tex Ritter

Do Not Forsake me Darling

1998 Museum St.Gallen

Paint on Everything, Carpet, Wake Up Shooting Video, If I am a man I must be brave, Dia show box

Show Down – Catdoor

1998 La Station, Nice

All Constructions, Sculptural Work, Acryl, Aluminium, Steel, Hard Board, Silkscreen, Clay, Videos, Monitors

Untitled (Hello Yes Good Thanks) (Gesomina)

1997 Kunsthalle St.Gallen

1997 Kunsthalle St.Gallen

Untitled (Hello Yes Good Thanks) (Gesomina)

Schichten


Hard Rubbish Painted, Videos, Monitors

1997 Kunstverein Konstanz

Video – Slippery

Straw, Monitor, Any Movie is OkDiscland, Shelter

1996 Shed Frauenfeld

1996 Eindhoven deFabrik

Hard Board, PaintShelter

1996 Castle Ludwig Binswanger

Roof Battens Glued, Video Project Hello Yes Good ThanksFrame Work

Hotel Room ProjectOther Places, One Room

1996 Museum Ittingen

It’s like as with the easter eggs, Chartreuse Ittingen, in the museum a fully furnished room for rent, Hotel Room Project

1996 Museum Ittingen

Other Places, One Room, Flyer

1996 Galeria Lajos Budapest

Hard Board Coated, Silk Screen on

Aluminium, Objects

Sentimental Blue

Monotoring Cameras, Small Frame

1995 Video Ost

Small Things

1995 Credit Suisse Kreuzlingen

Screen Printing on AluminiumStairwell

1994 Palais Thurn und Taxis Bregenz

InstallationRoland Works Hard for the Money

InstallationRoland Works Hard for the Money

1994 Palais Thurn und Taxis Bregenz

Schichten


Objects, sculptural Works

1990 – 1997 Möbelfabrik Kreuzlingen

Studio

Different Materials, Found Footage

1993 – 1995 Objects, sculptural Works

Schichten


Modells, Room and Function


Studio

Zusammenarbeit:

Architekten

Grafikern, Buchgestaltern und Webdesignern

Videospezialisten

Studien, Modellbauten, Raum und FunktionModells, Room and FunctionStudio


1993 Kantons Schule Frauenfeld

Silk Screen on AluminiumCogito


2. Flor, Completely Recirculation to a Space of Remembrance

To Mona

1. Flor, Paintings, Collages, Sculptures


Schichten


1993 Städtische Galerie Ravensburg

2 Paintings 2 SculpturesArt Award Lake Of Constance

1988 – 1992 Neuwerk Konstanz

Fotos, Painted Glass LayersIsland

1988 – 1992 Neuwerk Konstanz

Staged Painting, Layers, Roof BattensIsland

Staged Painting, Layers, Roof Battens

1988 – 1992 Neuwerk Konstanz, Viper Luzern, Österreichische Filmfestspiele Wels, Kunsthalle St. Gallen

Video Island

1988 Theagovia Bürgeln

Rollers Operated Machine, 80 Meter Roll Painting, BurlapIsland

Rollers Operated Machine, 80 Meter Roll Painting, Burlap

1988 Theagovia Bürgeln

Island

1987 Umspannwerk Singen, Eisenwerk Frauenfeld

Boards, different MaterialsAdolf Dietrich Art Award

R Dostal, [email protected]

Layers of Reality

(visible and yet fragile)

Roland Dostal’s SCHICHTEN (LAYERS) in the Kunstraum Kreuzlingen are drawings on paper created over the past eight to nine years. The title is parti-cularly appropriate as it refers not just the plethora of works assembled but also the very conscious formal language that the works have in common. The artist uses white, A4-sized photocopying paper for his drawings. A plain and simple material, 210 × 297 cm. These are the dimensions within which Roland Dostal exposes layers of reality and renders them visible. The artist works in pencil and ball-point pen. Shapes and colours come together on the paper that interact naturally, mutually attracting one another and then letting go, seeking contact only to revoke this and search elsewhere. His works are clearly differentiated and yet joined in animated dialogue, in a circulatory movement of overlapping and intertwining. Light seems to break through a deep and yet translucent surface. Like a structured woven fabric that is made up of countless threads, branching in different directions. The paper has been given a new outer structure through repeated folding: grids burrow into the smooth surface and open up another plane in which shapes interact with one another.

The distinctly individual quality as well as the all-so-vulnerable nature of the works are reminiscent of a person’s exposed skin marked by the ravages of time. The LAYERS render an artistic approach visible that, over the years, has attained a very conscious and yet intuitive proximity to the artist’s work itself and the creative process. Roland Dostal’s works on paper have their own inherent order and defy any explanatory description that can claim universal validity. What is palpable instead in his works is how time and form are merely concepts, visible and yet fragile, both continually in flux and therefore transi-tory. Artistic processes straddle the temporal borders of yesterday, today and tomorrow. And in the middle of this movement these layers of paper and paint

are created, have been created and will continue to be created. Dostal’s work is and remains a dimension in motion that will always change. It has come to rest in the Kunstraum Kreuzlingen for a short time before setting off once again.

Barbara Marie Hofmann, 2017

Circles in the Water

Anyone looking around Roland Dostal’s studio cannot fail but marvel at the artist’s creative energy. Works on paper are piled up everywhere, packed away in boxes, spread out on tables, mounted behind glass or scattered on the floor. The number of drawings is vast – so vast that anyone but the artist could easily lose track. On each sheet dozens of shapes, colours and structures, covering the whole surface area, testify to a work-intensive creative process executed at many different stages. Layers overlap one another right up to the edge of the picture; frequently both the front and back of a sheet is painted and traces of the work process – pressure marks, tears, scratches – contribute to their relief-like appearance. The sheets transport a feeling of boundlessness. One image seems to merge with the next. The compositions flow into one another, forming a shimmering, abstract pictorial cosmos that appears rigidly structured yet organic at the same time.

For several years now working on paper has proved to be the most suitable way for Dostal to further his artistic intention. Drawing can be done everywhere – the materials and space needed are minimal. Ball-point pens and pencils are the media of choice; A4-format photocopying paper the preferred support – materi-als that could also be delivered to the mountain village in a remote region in the Himalayas where he lived. With little in the way of infrastructure and, instead, a lot of time on his hands, Dostal pursued his interest in pictorial perception over many years while exploring the medium of drawing. Hundreds of works on paper were created in Asia or finished here. They can loosely be classified into different

groups and types but what they all have in common is that they have been made using simple writing materials. Black, white or blue is often employed, as are other materials and working processes. Certain works seem delicate, almost transparent; in others the graphite has gouged out deep furrows.

Sometimes photographs are embedded in the heavily worked surfaces: pho-to-lab proofs, prints or cuttings from magazines, newspapers and books. The photographs all come from Dostal’s own stock of material. These include pic-tures of his studio and exhibitions, taken for documentary purposes, but also a multitude of images that reflect his interests and different times in his life: pictures from newspapers, art reproductions, advertisements, invitations and postcards, as well as architectural views and photos of building sites that mirror his close study of built structures. As ‘external’, outer images they are confron-ted with the inner, compositional thoughts of a drawing. While photography captures the (supposedly) objective picture of a fleeting moment, the individual preoccupation with such an instant is manifested in a drawing. Through a dra-wing, an artist’s own personal perception shines through and reality undergoes a transformation. On a formal level the snippets of photographs emphasise the collage-like character of Dostal’s works on paper. They create a picture within a picture. Their rectangular outlines define borders and frames that correlate with the grid-like structures on some of the sheets that Dostal forms by folding the paper several times before beginning a drawing. The folds along the longitudinal and transverse edges, or occasionally in the diagonal, generally complement the sweeping brushstrokes and freely traced lines. Frequently the grid created by the folds becomes a ‘natural’ border for planar areas and motifs; in other instances these provide a transition to new compositional patterns. The folds and grids represent a kind of fragmentation, as found in many of Dostal’s works, in which he broaches the subject of the solitary and individual in relation to the whole. The drawings are combined into groups; distinct forms of categorisation such as the dating of works, however, are intentionally omitted.

As can be quickly ascertained, hardly one single drawing bears a date. Only se-veral early, conceptually planned groups of works that Dostal considers finished, enable us to picture the lower layers of many of the sheets we see today. All other works have been created at various times in many different stages. The sheets are repeatedly taken out, examined, sorted, possibly re-worked, put back into storage, left in peace – for a few days, months or years. The drawings are created in layers over a long – sometimes very long – period so that it can no longer be reconstructed when which individual step was carried out.

The reworking of existing pictures is central to Dostal’s creative process and is accompanied by a notion of the temporal that allows both existing as well as new works to be seen equally as a starting point for new compositional ideas. Dostal constantly reviews his pictures and transforms them as an intuitive and reflexive process. Every step executed is preceded by a phase of looking and contemplati-on. Even more so, in fact: Dostal says of his work that it evolves “from art to a form of artistic reflection”. This statement hits the nail on the head. The perception of art is of central importance – a specific form of contemplation with the aim of allo-wing new pictures to emerge, provoking reactions and articulating comments, by studying one’s own doing and creative output: “like the concentric circles formed on the surface of water after throwing a stone”, the artist said.

In this cycle the image-generating activity of drawing is nothing more but also no-thing less than one of many factors. Sometimes it gains the upper hand in phases of fervent activity, then contemplation and reflection dominate once again. Dostal articulates his thoughts through the act of drawing; drawing is the language he uses. “What is a picture?” is the question posed sheet for sheet. Through drawing Dostal formulates suggested solutions but never with any claim to absoluteness or finality. His pictures are open in their composition. They are momentary images of a continuum – a proposition, not a conclusion.

Yasmin Afschar, 2017

In the Rectangle of Temptation

Frames, grids, planar surfaces: structures to break down the diffuse and cha-otic into comprehensible entities that can be grasped – to be within one’s grasp only to be lost once again. Frames are a form of appropriating the world. Fra-mes and grids, verticals and horizontals, surfaces and spaces – setting accents in a wish for clarity. “Wishes are only good as long as they cannot be fulfilled”, Friedrich Hollaender sings in one of his songs, implying that the unfulfillable is always a wish to be fulfilled. In Stalker, Andrei Tarkovski describes a journey to the soul; Stalker is an apocalyptical warning against Babylonian hybris, a wishful journey to the innermost human values and the quest for knowledge. The film tells the story of ‘Stalker’, a former prisoner, who leads a professor and a writer into the so-called ‘Zone’ – an apocalyptical place devoid of people – to a room in which a person’s most secret desires can be fulfilled. A distinctly defined place, clearly delineated, at the intersection of the tangents x and y; mathematical calculations to put an end to the supposed chaos. But it would be doing mathematics an injustice if one were to think it wasn’t in any way sentimental. After all, even mathematics is similarly plagued by uncertainty.

In Roland Dostal’s work there is method in the frames and grids, planar surfa-ces and structures. They are systems to guide us through realms of thought, larger-than-life sized elements that provide a framework, a bridge – plat-form-like components, wrought with precision. The surroundings are reflected in the smooth, matte-white surfaces. The motif of the frame in Dostal’s works evokes window and door openings through which the searching eye glides, wanders off, gets its bearings. However, the search does not end unsuccessful-ly as Dostal integrates various reference systems in his exhibition installations that offer a whole range of possibilities to explore his worlds of imagery and metaphor. Concrete forms encounter dreamy anecdotes; formal perfection – apocalyptic, futuristic UFO-like elements.

The individual objects seem to identify each other mutually. The motif of duplica-tion recurs time and again. It is a mirror, a mirroring, a dialogue, a confrontation and a question about optimisation. Dostal’s silkscreen prints on aluminium depict framed moments in everyday life that he himself calls sentimental motifs. The images are from newspapers, prospectuses and books; they have become part of of his own biography and pick up on the subjects of both consolidation and dissolution at the same time. The grid dots set an example; images either surface or else they submerge.

Another guidance system: various people can be seen on ten monitors wande-ring around an old, run-down house. They are talking and singing, dancing and telling stories, and each of these people renders the space palpable in a different way. It is a search for knowledge, for the foreign and the other, a search for the self. The dancer translates the rooms into movement, the architect talks about the Great Wall of China, the philosopher struggles with the pace of his furious sentences, words and thoughts, while the musician is at one with his notes. The structures of movement in the films juxtapose with the static installation, and individual motifs from the films are repeated in the installation as well. The static state creates a projection surface and the correlation between a and b, between one and the other point of view is equally well the wish to step beyond the boundaries of one’s own imagination.

In Roland Dostal’s work there is method in the frames and grids, planar surfaces and structures. They are systems to guide us through realms of thought and his view on the appropriation of the world. Larger-than-life sized elements that provide a framework, a bridge, platform-like components, wrought with precision. The surroundings are reflected in the smooth, matte-white surfaces. The sculptural and installation-related elements reveal tangible and precisely formed modules and yet this precision does not provide any explanatory models. The rooms are filled with a theatrical relationship between viewer and object;

the objects reflect a dialectic ratio between assertion and mystery. They insist on keeping their distance and yet tempt their counterpart at the same time to grasp them through movement.

Roland Dostal’s work methods make use of repetitive structures with which he repeatedly places various work phases and work groups in different relations-hips to one another, picks up on things from the past once again, articulates or reformulates them or uses the same work groups to address another context. Dostal works from a variety of different angles that he then places in relation to one another. The model-like and stage-managed character of Dostal’s work testifies to the desire to assimilate a specific space completely within his own imagery, provoking questions at the same time about alternative models. Wit and humour undermine a certain formal severity; as – between all calculated factors, dimensional and numerical ratios – poetry repeatedly emerges. Dost-al’s lifeworld concept is only cool and distanced at the outset, as the inexpres-sible, the unpredictable, the uncertain moves within the midst of all this clarity. And every formulated, every named boundary simultaneously addresses the possibility of it being ignored as well. In Roland Dostal’s planar surfaces, struc-tures, objects, images and films, utopias and visions are united and lead the viewer into the expansive field of the complex question of being.

Dorothea Strauss

Kunsthalle St.Gallen, 1997

‘Roland works hard for the money!’

That Roland Dostal works hard for his money is, in the meantime, now known to everyone. It’s on the exhibition poster and what’s on posters is ‘true’. We’re familiar with all these objects: wooden shelters, places to sleep rough, televisions, useful things, sports equipment – equipment for self-improvement

and beauty enhancement – arrangements to satisfy our leisure-time passions – chairs, tables … games? DIY idylls? An exercise room? An art exhibition?

‘Roland works hard for the money!’ – is the art system being turned into a leisure time system here and leisure time into work? Dostal works in a field that is gene-rally considered, indeed credited with sovereign uselessness – adding perhaps the liberating comment: he produces works of art that defy any obvious function or defined use; they are not consumer goods, not ‘products’. And here then, the-se are such very objects. Arranged in a conglomeration that links them together as an installation but one that is not necessarily an installation in the usual meaning of the art term. Each element is also significant in its own right (like the objects in a shop-window display that catch the eye but cannot be isolated eit-her). They are there primarily to be taken in, to be taken on, perhaps to be taken away and, in their strikingly quick alienation perhaps also to be taken the wrong way. As an installation we find the first indication of something that makes up a presentation: pictures? sculptures? This installation is a space to contemplate the interplay of the heterogenous with the memories and stories evoked as a result. It stands for the artistic approach adopted by Dostal who produces paintings, sculptures and videos and uses these as media. The different media communi-cate in his work in a constant recycling process and address subjects, structures, skills, compositional principles through substitution and in a self-generating system that also always traces an inescapable circle. To me, painting always seems to be the starting point. Or rather painting as interference: as a black-and-white image, as an image in motion, in the duplication of an image in the form of a video recording as a ‘model’ of the image, as applying paint over objects. ‘Applying paint’ in general, paintings, sculptures, videos – always moving towards neutralisation or withdrawal, as the components white, black, beige, light and grids also condition their intensification, dematerialisation and hermeticism at the same time. Images? Sculptures? Television pictures? The art or industrial product in its most neutral, virtually sterile manifestation: recently resprayed

and totally untouched. This system, this installation, however, also stands for the lifestyle of today, here and now, that – ‘monitored’ by the omnimpresent influence of the aesthetic, the range of consumer products and demands – is to be classified as an inescapable state of control. We are perpetually influenced by things, regulatory systems, stipulations and omnipresent communication. Everything is connected to everything else; not in a romantic sense but through the ‘speed’ of our age and because everyday life is organised down to the last detail. And everything has an influence on everything else: What do you find beautiful? What do you notice? What is your relationship to things? Are you sporty? Do you use any aids? Does a game you play become serious or your se-riousness a game? Everything talks to us constantly. Things communicate and, what’s more, things intrude on our lives – Roland works hard for his money and, through these things, intrudes on the intruders. Here art is a game in all seriousness and the sovereign uselessness of art is a discourse on doing, the seriousness of doing as the planned achievement of the unplanned: the game, wherever the viewpoint is focussed on the creative redefinition of existing notions, known terms, logical conclusions, definitive definitions: the perfect, logical principle of the perfected break. This is a discourse about constructive conditions as well as being a citation of the formative principles of Constructi-vism based on logic and discourses carried on in modern times about the use of everyday objects/products in art as a means of securing evidence – objets trouvés or prefabricated materials (as for example in Minimal Art). The art/de-sign discussion is also addressed and with it the beginnings of modernism and the subsequently initiated aspiration to permeate all areas of life with art, with an aesthetic design (after all, everything is connected to everything else). And Dostal’s consolidation and juxtaposition of self-made, combined and found objects provokes questions about the past and the present at the same time. It is also important to ‘show off’ one’s skills as a craftsman: an artist can really do something, he works hard for his money and he does his work well. Regarding

the execution of a work, he doesn’t let himself be irritated by the ‘artistic’. The poster provides clues to solve puzzles and poses questions as answers – what is work, what is leisure time, what is beauty, what works together (composition), what is art (the perfect body, the perfect image of beauty, the perfectly designed rubber ring)? In art, in leisure time, in a holiday idyll: this is where one goes and gets to see something beautiful. The familiar and the alien: everything works really well; ideas, objects are in flux and, through their alienation in art wander back into our everyday lives. Karl Kraus once said: “The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back.” Beauty harbours horror if it is noticed. Art is always supposed to break with the familiar and aspire to heightening intensity, looking at things closely. System understood + perfectly styled function = alienness. Stumbling as part of a composed gait, seriousness, fun, aesthetics – art: things are to be blamed (for us) and we for them.

Beatrix Ruf

Introductory speech held at the Palais Thurn und Taxis, Bregenz, 1994

R Dostal Selected Works2017 Vexer Verlag, St. Gallern, 1990-2008 Former Car Dealer, Castle Ludwig...

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