Camuflajes

The Camuflajes project is a dedicated collaboration between a visual artist and a writer. Over the course of several years, the Graz-based painter Johannes Zechner and the Mexico City-based writer Pedro Serrano have developed a long-distance collaboration that ‘turns questioningly towards a world in which living spaces are abused as theatres of war and the number of drones generates more interest than the singing of birds’ (J. Zechner).

Camouflage is basically an expression of the connection between living beings and their environment. One could also call it a survival technique. In a military context, weapons and soldiers are protected by camouflage and, from this protection, can operate highly efficiently from a place of concealment, as it were.

Camouflage can be used to deceive opponents or the enemy. In these works, Zechner employs various camouflage fabrics and items of clothing. As if remnants from tragic contexts, discarded, lost and picked up again, recoded and indeterminate in their new function, these patterns lose none of their horror. Yet they are also a sought-after fashion tool. Zechner combines them with boxes that have been taken apart – tablet boxes, packaging for food, office supplies, etc. This robs them of their three-dimensionality, turning them into flat image carriers.

Moreover, Zechner creates collages out of fabrics and various other materials on canvases, which he also paints. Words, poems or text passages by Pedro Serrano are integrated into the pictures. Serrano wrote some 30 poems for this project. The fact of war and experience of violence in his own country flow into these poems, as does his reaction to Zechner’s visuality.

Both artists agree that neither painting nor poetry will change the world, but their readers and viewers may. Art demands an attitude from the audience through which they ‘sensitively intuit values of general relevance and thus bring about the conditions for a creative reorientation’ (Serrano).

The project will also be shown in Mexico City and Madrid and is accompanied by a catalogue in German and Spanish.