EXHALATION SERIES

Vienna, Austria: During the past five years, the Austrian artist Boicut has created a cohesive body of work that invites his audience to explore the puerile and irreverent side of modern adult life. In his latest series, “EXHALE“, Boicut aims at reinterpreting his signature style of colorful and pareidolic shapes through an unusual and unexpected medium: plastic vacuum bags and leftover cloth snips.

After gradually giving up a figurative narrative to focus on more abstract works - which gradually extirpated his compositions of volume and line - creating pieces that boil everyday objects down to their very essential colors and shape, Boicut has gradually pushed the boundaries of what can be considered a “painting” by experimenting with new materials: to this date, Boicut has experimented with different surfaces, including a baseball bat and a jerry can. In his latest series, titled “EXHALE”, however, the artist has taken these experiments to a whole new level, completely forfeiting both canvas and paint in order to create unique works with nothing but rags and vacuum plastic bags.

Usually employed for keeping clothes in storage, the vacuum bags are repurposed by Boicut in conjunction with colorful cloth snips to create compositions filled with his signature anamorphic shapes. With provoking titles such as “The Irony of Dehydrating Along the Sea“, the works are created by the careful layering of pieces of colorful cloth which are, in turn, pressed together as the air is sucked out of the bags. Justapoxing with Boicut´s usually precise execution of his canvases, the physical effect of shrinking the plastic bags adds an element of unforseeability and randomness to the finished work. A proponent of Willem de Kooning “encounters”, Boicut says that “the idea came to me whilst observing a pile of laundry on the floor of my apartment. Something about the way they were spread over the cold floor made me think of using them as paint”. Vera Steinkellner, 2018