Stretch Sculpture

Peter Senoner

The adjective "stretchy" implies elasticity, expansibility, pliancy. The term "flexibility" is a core concept in our present-day vocabulary, but it was originally taken from botany where it referred to the "relationship of suppleness and inertia" in the flora. The latest sculptural ensembles of Peter Senoner fall back on the natural metaphor and indicate a larger context.

Monomon, Passo Sella 17.08.2004, 2002–04
wood, cast aluminum , Kryolith glass 205 x 300 x 80 cm
(Photo: Silja Addy)

The artist enjoys ensnaring the curiosity of the viewer by a world of organic and zoo-morph forms - not in the sense of an illusionist escapism, but as a seismographic projection area for desires and fears, as a meta-romantic counterconcept to the paradoxically disconcerting rationality schemes of statistic data and risk calculations. The plant hybrids and creatural protagonists of the artist do not invoke creatures from the unconscious, but find their referential material in a broad reservoir of the history of art and nature as well as in magazine, movie and television pictures.

Pseudopubleurum01, 2005
Installation, pencil and colored pencil on paper, 410 x 275 cm
wood 100 x 40 x 40 cm

The pictorial strategy is not simply to quote, but to work in picture layers - computer animation and video projection overlay the classical drawing and sculpture media. The dramatics resembles a jungle; it is made up of large-format pencil drawings and appropriates the representation conventions of biological research as a background foil. Based on these drawings, small-format sculptures evolve; together with illusionist computer-generated animation, they oscillate between the invocation of fantastic elements and techniques of scientific objectivisation, between the concept of nature and natural science, but also between the artefact of art and the artificiality of nature.

Sensoroticron, 2003
Installation wood 45 x 25 x 20 cm, audio, video

So, medial reworking actions are in the foreground; they fictionalise the masterly worked (sculptural) object/creature of imagination on a second layer and lay bare the semantics of an ambivalent system in a synthesis of emotion and reflection.