MAPS OF TENSION Catalogue

MAPS OF TENSION



WORKS BY

Konstantino Dregos & Matías Di Carlo



Wadström Tönnheim Gallery’s mission is to examine the idea of the painterly, be it
also through related media such as photography, sculpture, installations, video and
drawing, in order to understand and to promote the direction of painting and its
relevance to contemporary visual culture.

The Gallery is owned and operated by Mattias Tönnheim and Andreas Åkesson.

Thinking is incessant crossing out

Remarks on the works of Konstantino Dregos and Matias Di Carlo.

Two artists - Matias Di Carlo and Konstantino Dregos - meet in Maps of Tension with their
different media, painting and sculpture, and yet this encounter seems to reflect something
more than a random or even arbitrary decision of a gallery programme. And it is not
enough to speak only of painting and sculpture, for what both Dregos and Di Carlo
understand as their respective practices is a specific sensitivity to a materiality that is then
realised in a form that one associates with the conventions of these two media.

Drego's painting, strictly speaking, defies easy attribution because he is not interested in
being measured by the standards of media categorisation. He thinks with his pictures,
collects and arranges fragments of reality and fiction, of texts, gestures, pictorial echoes
from the engine room of the subconscious.

It is basically a poetic process of condensation through reduction, and at the same time, it
is also true that condensation occurs through maximisation. It is only a small step from
horror vacui to capto vacui.

This reach into the void is also an existential one, a gesture that always understands the
resulting image as a form of possibility of absence from other images. Presence is the
problem, the dead are never the problem. There are works that function strongly from the
material character, haptic, sensory display panels that easily seduce one to lose oneself in
the surfaces instead of sinking into the depths. It is movements of thought more than
movements of the wrist that we observe here, light-footed and fleeting traces.

Notations of things and the relationships between them. Their appearance and
disappearance. In this sense, Dregos stands in the tradition of those artists who, from the
Renaissance to the present, have practised visual thinking, choosing a technique, let us call
it drawing or painting, that serves as a system for writing down the fundamentally
ephemeral.

Drego's collage painting, which is full of signs and materials, exists in a wide variety of
formats and can also occupy very large surfaces. But regardless of the size, the pictures
develop a decided presence that is hard to escape. There are works that can certainly be
associated with the pathos of informal painting, as can be found, for example, in the work
of artists such as Tàpies, yet always remaining in their own idiom, which immediately
undermines these attributions.

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Matias Di Carlo's sculptures in aluminium and brass follow a law that is more than just a
description of their production. The principle of folding anchors them not only in a
context of experimental research into materials, as we know from the Bauhaus teacher
Josef Albers, who had his students fold papers in the preliminary course, but the fold is
also - and here we are back with Dregos - a movement of thought that inspires
multi-perspectival observation. Deleuze famously wrote about the Baroque philosopher
Leibniz and his relationship to folds.

With the word pli for fold in French, Deleuze allows himself excursions into ex-pli-cing,
im-pli-cing and com-pli-cing. Folding in and out leads to new connections and options for
viewing. Di Carlo folds his material in the same way as a word is deconstructed, options,
variants. In the "Fold series" presented here, the material aluminium and its counterpoint
brass enter into a formally very happy alliance; together they are the vocabulary and the
grammar of this inflection. Inside and outside lose their traditional positions and, like a
Möbius strip, the inside is also the outside. Thinking as a form-solving strategy appears as
an answer to the questions that the material itself is unable to answer.

Rubble and fragment are modes of description that would be easy to handle if one did
not at the same time constantly see the opposite in the objects. Construction and
deconstruction confront each other like wrestling principles, of a struggle that will never
be decided. Di Carlo folds the steel like a paper aeroplane, like a leaf that has no weight.
In the drawings of the "Skyroot Series" there are light-footed and reduced settings that
are related to a formal language of the Minimal without its categorical rigour. The linear
principle of the design construction blends wonderfully with the cloudy gesture of the
powdery pigment. Diffuse and precise at the same time, the form is indebted to the
material.

Thinking-movement, which in this case for both artists means not directionless but
direction-free, because fundamentally free in the attitude that when the magnetic field of
creative energy changes, the poles can swap and trigger dialectical counter-reactions.
Just as the object - the sculpture - always thinks about the space around it, the painting
looks back at the viewer. The senses receive, but they also inquire, as Paul Valery once
wrote. Di Carlo and Dregos communicate through their material about the processuality
of their work. Lucid and poetic manifestations that challenge our perception as a
sharpening of the intellectual as well as sensory sensorium.

Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge

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About the paintings by Konstantino Dregos

born 1977 Athens/Greece, lives and works in Berlin/Germany.

Capto Vacui (grabbing into the empty)

Dregos work shows the unending adventures of the idea from the moment its
procreation into the state of its implementation and fate on its way to the human
perception. This path might be filled with contradictions, logical gaps, errors,
reversals, abolitions and simultaneously the blank carrier of the aimed
metamorphosis, but nevertheless offers a resilient insight on the human condition.
The platonic glance on the world and the vibrating space between Science and
Myth constitutes the theoretical and practical framework of this epic attempt.

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Mechanics Capto Vacui Series, 2020
Paint Paper Collage Charcoal Graphite Marker Tape Pastels on Canvas
180x220 cm

10



Capto Vacui Series, 2020
Paint Paper Collage Typewriter Graphite Marker on Canvas
165x200 cm

12



Capto Vacui Series, 2020
Paint Paper Collage Typewriter Graphite Marker on Canvas
165x200 cm

14



The Mountain Prophet Capto Vacui, 2020
Paint Paper Collage Charcoal Graphite Marker Tape Grip tape on Canvas
165x200 cm

16



A Letter to Nobody Capto Vacui Series, 2020
Paint Paper Collage Charcoal Graphite Marker Tape Grip tape on Canvas
180x150 cm

18



Untitled Capto Vacui Series, 2020
Paint Paper Collage Pastel Graphite Tape Pencil Industrial Foam on Canvas
170x135 cm

20



Z to A Capto Vacui Series, 2020
Paint Paper Collage Pastel Graphite Tape Pencil Industrial Foam on Canvas
165x200 cm

22



The Recount Capto Vacui Series, 2021
Paint Chalk Charcoal Marker Paper Collage on Canvas
200x200 cm

24



Split Capto Vacui Series, 2021
Paint Chalk Charcoal Marker Paper Collage on Canvas
150x300 cm

26



Untitled Capto Vacui Series, 2021
Paint Chalk Charcoal Marker Paper Collage on Canvas
150x130 cm

28



Vicarius ONE Capto Vacui Series, 2021
Paint Chalk Charcoal on Canvas
140x120 cm

30



Untitled Capto Vacui Series, 2021
Paint Chalk Charcoal Marker Paper Collage on Canvas
130x130 cm

32



Untitled Capto Vacui Series, 2021
Paint Chalk Charcoal Marker Paper Collage on Canvas
130x130 cm

34



The Fire Sermon series 2021 (1/8)
Felt Sandpaper Paint Pencil Wax Pastels on Cardboard, in wood frame
50X50 cm

36



The Fire Sermon series 2021 (2/8)
Felt Sandpaper Paint Pencil Wax Pastels on Cardboard, in wood frame
50X50 cm

38



The Fire Sermon series 2021 (3/8)
Felt Sandpaper Paint Pencil Wax Pastels on Cardboard, in wood frame
50X50 cm

40



The Fire Sermon series 2021 (4/8)
Felt Sandpaper Paint Pencil Wax Pastels on Cardboard, in wood frame
50X50 cm

42



The Fire Sermon series 2021 (5/8)
Felt Sandpaper Paint Pencil Wax Pastels on Cardboard, in wood frame
50X50 cm

44



The Fire Sermon series 2021 (6/8)
Felt Sandpaper Paint Pencil Wax Pastels on Cardboard, in wood frame
50X50 cm

46



The Fire Sermon series 2021 (7/8)
Felt Sandpaper Paint Pencil Wax Pastels on Cardboard, in wood frame
50X50 cm

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