clear series (2012-2021)
“Clear”
is a strange title for a series of artworks that look to be anything but clear. They seem hazy, unsettling and multi-layered in the most literal sense of the word. We search for details and connections that might shed light on things, but artist Christian Manss doesn’t make this easy for us. He begins by printing a photograph onto a sheet of blank newspaper, and then uses a clear varnish to apply this to a canvas that he has already prepared with colour. The varnish makes the newspaper transparent, which brings the colours behind it back out onto the surface. Once the varnish has dried, Manss paints over the collage and then, later, attacks that layer with water, solvents and sponge. What is left is an object partially freed of overpainting - what could be clearer than that? Manss focuses heavily on the structure and texture of these pictures. He wants his work to bring about interactions between smooth surfaces and coarse, and creates clear structures for these pictorial spaces. When we first see his pictures, each one seems fairly uniform in itself. But things start to get confusing when we look closer. If we concentrate hard, more and more overlaps and connection errors come into view. The layers of paint, the fragmented photograph and the sense of alienation all conspire to free our view from the obstructions of the history of places. For a brief moment the scene is endowed with a kind of fictitious innocence, becomes a place so unfamiliar to us that we are free to fill it with our own imagination.
(Moritz Stange, Art Historian)
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