The firmament. Time. Cognition. Terra firma. The exhibition Terrain is a tale of two modalities in the art of Clemens Wolf, both sublime and brutal. A former skydiver, Wolf’s experience of this extreme sport gives rise to the installation in The Stable.

Hanging from the rafters are several five decommissioned parachutes that have been soaked in vats of
epoxy resin with pigment, then hoisted with a pulley and left to dry. The resulting forms are the outcomes of gravity and chance, as the material hardens into bulbous shapes. Soft amorphous synthetic material then turns into rigid encrustations painted to mirror the exterior colors of S-Chanf, with its mountainous variegations of shifting green landscape and cool bluish river reflected in the dappled sun of the Engadin. Embedded into these rough hewn sculptural paintings, are the cognitive memories of Wolf’s leap into the void, of the eternal sky, and that exhilarating moment when the parachute chord is released, and the body cedes to the mind as it descends towards its targeted landing spot on the terrain. In this vulnerable position thought turns into a pure state of being, the time lapse of conscious movement and reaction. And, in this contiguous descent, the perspective of the landscape shifts into abstract shapes with fractal details.

Meanwhile on terra firma, the artist explored the terrain of the glacier of Morteratsch in the Engadin. The fast receding ice front and geological formations in and around its environ are the subject of a new series of paintings (Glacier 1-5). Based on phone snaps, the photo-realistic images verge on the abstract, and are painted with lightning rapidity, usually in one intense session. Spontaneity defines their outcome, which requires a dexterous response to the stimuli of both a sequential photographic record and the psychic memory of the place and time of his encounter. A long, slow, look at the forms reveals snow covered ice sheets, stalactites, rocks and geological strata all compressed and elaborated on with fluid brushwork. In the muted tones a certain mood pervades, one of melancholic awe at the beauty and power of the pristine location. Then, another cognitive reality sets in. The adage of “glacial time” conjures slow, imperceptible movements, and ecological stability as measured in centuries. Here lies the paradoxical nature of the terrain in Clemens Wolf where the elements of air and earth meet in the space time continuum. The speed of change from altitude to the moment of earthly impact is where the body cedes to the mind.
In a circularity of terrestrial earth and boundless sky, the parachute paintings are the brutalist forms of industrial man contrasted by paintings that contain impressionistic traces of a subtle geological record circa 2025. It’s where human activity, and natural phenomena converge. In that time-lapse of action/reaction, sequential movement, and pristine wilderness, you have an utmost stillness and the purity of the fleeting moment.

Text by Max Henry