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Inventing Experience
Taken from the publication of the same name

The built environment is often a warehouse for memories and emotions other than those related to materiality.
The process in which the mind absorbs and disperses images is highly complex and transcends the concrete world related through the senses. In this collection of work, Fabian Patzak extends and refines the concerns of his past projects through an exploration of the psychological connections attached to architectonic spaces, whether perceived through lived experience, memory, emotion, thoughts, or dreams. Similar to his Viennese predecessors Adolf Loos and Frederick Kiesler, who schematized architecture and its interiors to include the mental and tactile, Patzak dispenses with time and scientific observation to construct space and considers the phenomenological and psychic values that shape perceptions of both literal and metaphorical environments.

Like his contemporaries, Toba Khedoori and Dan Graham, who also engage with architecture at a conceptual level, Patzak's limited color palette, and the intensity of solemnity and quietude in his work, can be unsettling. However, this is not a criticism of Patzak's dissection of architecture. Through his deft manipulation of fragment, scale, and perspective, Patzak exploits vantage points that appear slightly off-kilter, challenging the conventions and processes of spatial construction and representation, and confounding appeals to a fixed narrative.

Fabian Patzak's investigation into spatial perception orders interior and exterior views of the public, urban environment, and the private, domestic sphere, to suggest a particular relationship between the viewer and rendered world, but positions the works' interpretive possibilities as open-ended and vacant of didactic meaning. Creating an aura of solitude, detachment, and ambiguity, the viewer is relinquished to freely encounter the obscurity, turmoil, or tranquility of the mind's limitless capacity for imagination and recollection of experience.

Elizabeth St.George, 2011


Installtion view | das weisse haus, 2010



Someplace Next Year
Review

A Master of Reductionist Architectures of Desire

If there is such a thing as a young contemporary generation of painters, and if, as it seems, they show a strong interest in spatial depictions, then Fabian Patzak is undoubtedly one of their most outstanding representatives. The atmosphere of his reductionist, almost sober oil paintings are reminiscent of Edward Hopper or Charles Sheeler, however Patzak´s grisaille palette renders them more condensed. Even before having read their titles, they portray quintessentially American interiors suggestive of classics by Hitchcock, Woody Allen, or Paul Auster´s New York Trilogy; spaces that narrate vastness and openness as well as the intensity of New York as a center of the arts - without catering to drama or kitsch. His oil-on-wood miniatures possess an even more impressive intensity: among them, Windows on Oxford Street, which resembles a linocut, subtly breaks the subject´s sobriety.

The prevailing mood of solitude, that alongside their interest in space distinguishes this generation of young Viennese artists, is intensely present in Patzak´s work. Solitude expressed through emptiness, dominates the interior paintings in this exhibition. One is literally drawn into these completely refined idylls, and begins to relish the peace and breadth, because – although it might not sound like it - Fabian Patzak´s paintings are anything but depressing or melancholic; he paints the silence amidst turmoil. He paints what could be seen if all things unclear, hectic, confusing were to vanish from the scene, and only the “now” remain. The works on exhibit are architectures of desire, quite capable of communicating this silence.

Wolfgang Pichler, 2009


Installtion view | MUSA Startgalerie, 2009


European Art Project
Exhibition text. Chelsea Galerie, Basel

Fabian Patzak's paintings explore constructed dwellings. He is interested in intrinsically impersonal modern architecture - functional public buildings which resemble each other the world over: anonymous, faceless, sober and functional... [Patzak] doesn't concentrate on the grand achievements of international modernity , but rather on the quotidian details of its interiors. In meticulous grisaille paintings he renders the corners and angles that we have noticed but previously disregarded.

A curtain reflected in a hotel room mirror is one of the painter's motifs. He composes set like spaces, scenarios for subjective realities. What occurs behind theses walls? The palpable absence of these room fragments construct space for the projection of the viewer's own anticipations, fears and notions. These perceptions can be divergent: from urban coldness or visual peace within an over stimulated environment, to futility or solitude within a formally standardized world.

To what extent can representational painting be reduced before entirely losing its correspondence to reality? Fabian Patzak's paintings tread this line between abstraction and recognizability, but can easily be read as abstract constructivist compositions because of the fineness of their composition and formal tightness.

Eva Bächtold, 2008


Installation view | Projektraum Chelsea Galerie, 2008