An encounter with Bianca Lugmayr's art means initially – and above all – movement: taking a walk with your feet on the ground but with your head in the clouds of fantasy. Here we focus on her text works, which appear sensual, foreign, but yet, at the same time, familiar. In our minds images develop that are already stored there and are continually newly texted. In this process she dissects the still, precarious revolt with an exciting deceleration. It is a dream bird from the paradise garden of her fantasy that hatches the egg of this art and visualises the invisibly imagined behind and in front of the everyday scenes. In a sensual interplay she freezes the textile formatting and the textual content, and then transforms them, enchanted in an amalgam, back into the physical. Here, seen philosophically, the artist ventures into aesthetic formalisation, shows sketched sculptural sections, everything light as a feather as if they were canals of the accidental. Inclinations. This transports puts us into a dancing ship, it is like coming to shore on a coast. Like smoking glass kisses. Like a bare morning. Like velvet, blue and meandering on the hills of the night. Like sweetness without a look. Like textual poetry from the world that the artist lays out in front of us. The finely chiselled dimensions develop from something playful, from the laboratory situation, researching in undetermined directions, but without a goal, always prepared to fail.
In her art, however, something provocatively new develops out of this, something ambivalent, which is, paradoxically, easy and difficult, fast and slow, text and image, lying, hanging, floating through our minds, movement and speed. She turns on the small dream machine that makes us into human beings with our excited passions and searching longings. She weaves blue nets of longing in which we enjoy getting caught and yet remain free and autonomous. In the echo space of the eternal eternity of the moment, when our steps have slowed down, when the languages and speaking become softer, the artist shows us a book in which she has collated texts, hovering slightly as if sewed into a dress. With all the essential instruments that shape the intertextually coded aspect of her art into a comprehensible format. And this is how her art is, life in the echo of weaving, spinning, and tying, argued with threads. The activity "sewing" is symbolically close to writing because it ties the threads of life together. With weaving, in fact linking, and with sewing, actually translated inspirations from life, we veil and reveal truths.
Fragments in a state of suspension
With the inspirations from life we have arrived at opening and concealing. Right down to the last ramifications, down the very tips. Here we research the orbits of the inner planets and the happiness of involuntary memories. One writes in order to be loved. Where, in any case, there is nothing to know. There is no renunciation without speculation about a subsequent gain. What is useful for itself? And what happens in turning over? And why do we sew? We know the stories, the invented and speculative ones, the absurd and sorrowful ones, we know Penelope who waits for Odysseus and tells the men who desire her that she wants first to finish weaving the big carpet. and she does this. But every evening she unravels the work she has done during the day, as she does not want to come to an end. Does art follow life or life art? Much grows heated through textiles and through art. The indifferent and the desirable and all the shades between with and without patterns. And writing? Writing is a mode of the rhetoric, as T. S. Eliot says, an affection for the world, for the ideal. And what is sewing? Like with writing, it is giving an indication of oneself, linking networks. A part of existence. Because there is not anything to know. Sewing is an aesthetic experience. An intertextual connotation. Imaginary research. The essence of love is disillusion. Writing and sewing are its sensual longing. A game with language. An unmasking. As original social critique. Finding what connects and expressing it in language, binding and joining with thread, putting together, not constricting. The sack dress is an advance into life, like the bike. Liberation from the corset.
A self-determined life
Searching for the lost paradise. In the direction of the sunbeams in the afternoon, which extend into the early evening, like a fleeting beauty. An hour dissolved into details that stand for themselves. Realities in which one no longer believed or asked about. What remains is a form of simplicity. The style of the dress is like the style of the building. A very different one. And yet, essentially, related because reduced. An existential dwelling. As a paradox of the present. The most beautiful books are written like the most beautiful clothes. Texted clothing. With a turn the artist suggests seeing the dress of life from the end, wide and open, tolerating the parlour. Seeing the dress reflected in life, quenching the thirst of the day. Just as each kiss awakens the next one, like flowers in a meadow in May. One can only lose the thread respectfully if one looks at art like love, without illusions. Life in an infinite script and an infinite thread. What remains in art, actually, is the dream text. The skin-like quality as a canvas for the ideas of the mysterious.
Peter Niedermair
Translated by James Roderick O’Donovan