artist portrait, Ewa Stern video, Cem Angeli text
Edgar Honetschläger tests the boundaries of the possible, always along the limit in order to question the existing standard, the process being as important as the results.
Vain is the attempt to classify this corpus of ideas into orderly progressions, straight lines, fixed positions, separate stages. Edgar Honetschläger’s work and life do not allow for that. He moves between cultures and working techniques and operates with the diversity and inconsistency of a globalized world.
We find ourselves before a buried treasure, like an archeological site, where we would cause damage to the traces and clues by digging. The deposits and sediments that would be removed are traces of the artist’s self; in all layers we can feel the spiritual circling movement, a search for identity, a certain physicalness.
To try to disentangle the system of analogies permeating his oeuvre, the symbolic dimensions, the circular movement, the sensuality, the social reflection about eternity, the mechanisms of identity and concealment governing the body, this effort is ultimately doomed to fail.
In the course of time, the irresistible vocation to construct text and to generate narrative produces surprisingly consistent structures – where one either joins the other or it does not.
A dense network of references comes into being, embedded in a network of discourses, within which the elements do not make sense without the others, where the processual character of the work becomes more and more evident, an open work without completion and finality.
From the outset his artistic endeavor consists in narrating, storytelling, a narrative patchwork, with absurd, epic, comical stories. These fragmentary tales touch on the sources of mythology; derive from popular stories, current news, political affairs, persons and objects of his surroundings.
From this viewpoint it seems that his work as a whole obeys a double functional principle of an almost linguistical kind: articulation and integration, assembly and fusion, syntax and poetics. The compression of meaning he carries out in his artistic figures has its original impulse in a mental activity that can be interpreted as decipherment. The signs generate what we can not help doing: thinking.
He discloses metaphorical realms of autonomy and creates cultural spaces, geographically, imaginarily, socially with an open and thus autonomous temporality. He works with narrative sequences which can be full of contradictions at times. Sometimes he reveals himself as object; on the other hand he is the subjectivity creating them.
His visual art is characterized by the effort to reach an existence outside of themselves, independent of the artist and the recipient. He uses exterior areas and architecture, experiments with space and the friction between two-dimensionality and tri-dimensionality, a coordinated interaction between architecture, drawing and painting occurs. Drawing constitutes an important means within his work, as a result of his consistent examination of two-dimensionality. Within the sequences, the second and third dimension are interchanged quoted or merged. Honetschlaeger has made himself independent from the belief in perfection as well as its opposite. The one focal point of perspective does indeed exist, but only in close connection with all possible constellations of focal points.
The objects of daily use that surround us, tools, artifacts, attire, they all hold a peculiar fascination for him. They tell us of universal issues and at the same time of certain eras, cultures and ways to understand the world. Finally they tell us of their ownership’s fugacity, how they and we have different existences that intersect and meet temporarily in time and space. We are nothing but circumstances. (Cem Angeli)