Since his last series, “Inescapable Nature”, Kilian Glasner has sought immersion in nature to find himself experiencing isolation. For the artist, to study the landscape is to dive into the space of the world.
After almost three months immersed between Patagonia and the Pantanal, Kilian (re) discovered himself in a distant time in which nature appropriated his being and transformed it into a landscape. Transmuted, he reconstructed what he saw, and invented and rearranged the space so as to report his journey in the exhibition “Austral Encounters”.
Abstracted by silence, the artist converts the world into a more pleasant and harmonious place, trimming edges and leaving a sparkling trail that marks the places he passed with pigments and dry pastel. In front of his drawings, senses emerge through color, scattered across deserts inhabited by a mysterious emptiness where clouds pour out to hide the mountains and fill them with a beige color that the wind spreads over the paper. In light brown, yellow or pastel tones we recognize the arid smell of loneliness. The eye experiences the earth, the dust, the wind, the storm.
In the middle of the desert, we are invited to travel to the Pantanal and take the place of the landscape where the birds dance. In the installation “Vôo” (flight) –inspired by Buraco das Araras, in Mato Grosso do Sul Brazilian state– Kilian interferes in the flight of macaws to reconstruct it in a poetry of images and sounds; a new perspective, full of freedom and an unlimited imagination. In the impossibility of recreating nature, the artwork –in its dynamic coexistence with opposites– says more than the truth. It creates the truth. It does not describe the action; it places it before us so that we can experience the artist’s feeling for a few minutes.
In “Austral Encounters” Kilian Glasner exposes the landscape as a place of possibilities; he structures the exhibition in fragments in order to materialize the complexity of the setting and demonstrate that space can teach us to look at the world on new aspects, revealing realities left at the margin of vision.