Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

(link)

We've been talking for a while about the model, the physical metaphor of our world's increasing virtuality as it becomes abstracted by capital, computers, etc. Built to code: the blueprints and plans allowing the capitalist's virtualizing the world as its representation.
Recall, Rachel Harrison's screwing of semiological space, objects that felt like suburban malls destruction of good sense. Now the hypothetical of that abstraction entering physical as opposed to semio- space. We become lost in scales, the map now producing the territory, etc. and questions, "From which vantage are we seeing" type confusions so prevalent in Altmann.

But so anyway, Past:

"...The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. "Housing" replaces "houses," which replaces "house" distinct from "home," which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday..."

      -Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg

"...which is why we are seeing them everywhere as sculpture today, proving virtuality always existed: the world abstracted by money, power, plans. The children grown on building blocks eventually see the world as such object... juvenile megalomania grown to find their imagination justified and fueled by capital. Children's fevers eventually grow and sediment as reality... reality as abstraction underneath, toys."

       -Matthew Zivich at What Pipeline

"...staging us as onlookers to worlds as sandboxes. A dissonance between our interior worlds that of course we find increasingly virtual and beholden to our godlike control of drag/drop materiality conjuring our desires that the outer world increasingly doesn't reflect, the world steamrolled at the whim of other's control. So our turning to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense, fulfilling our need for control over a world we increasingly seem to not have much over..."

      -“Sylvanian Families Biennial 2017” at XYZ collective

"...The bedroom as terrarium..."

      -Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts

"...the still obviously recurring theme of the exterior as phantasmagoria: blank surfaces for projection and the psychic cruel comedy of visage as facade. The use of architecture as representing psychic space has become a major motif in art, but whereas it had been usually literary or filmic as physical metaphors for memory or dreams or whatever, art's use has recently become much more concerned with its meaty resemblance to a skull, reminiscent of Deleuze pointing out that Francis Bacon didn't so much paint portraits but heads..."

      -Brian Griffiths at Vilma Gold

"....properly weighted, the iPhones will levitate..."

     -Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project

Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg

(link)

The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. Housing replaces houses replaces house distinct from home, which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday. Looking down at our hands the sphere of the earth is said to be at our fingertips. This abstraction feels lived in. The architectural model exists as a plan scalable and virtual. The mix of real scales and virtual scales - a pipe standing in for piping - a vertiginous collapse, our proprioception lost in relation vibrates. Altmann's loss of orientation to physical objects has followed him for some time now.

Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick



Altmann inverted his work. What were once beams barnacled in the happy modern-trash detritus - like a more highly magnetized Rachel Harrison, or a contemporary Barres de bois - have been in this exhibition turned inside-out into spherical holes of diorama-like insides, magnetar earths erupting, revealing a cybernetic brain theatre; the gallery itself turned inside out, internal, as if the small spheres contained the negative air of the white gallery space, the clippings on the tarp reiterating the outside/inside mix-up, like is the air in your stomach technically outside of you?
It’s hard not mention Mike Kelley’s Silver Ball, or Altmann’s contemporary, Nicolas Ceccaldi’s toy gun surveillance, and his own past objects but this exhibition runs with those, fueled by the drug of real heavy installionism.
The press release’s assemblage surrealism amplifies the theatricality of the whole thing to levels above reason, a little too indulgent, doing little to parse the actual small strangeness that exists, and instead bludgeoning it with lacking language. We get it dude, cybernetic weenies from venus.