Evelyn Plaschg – Rapid Babies, installation view

Paulina Caspari is delighted to present Rapid Babies, the first solo exhibition by Evelyn Plaschg (b. 1988 in Gnas, Austria, lives and works in Vienna) at the gallery.
While in earlier series Plaschg created pictures of bodies using powdered pigments on paper, the artist turned to oil paint last year. The new paintings are based on mobile phone videos of draped and adorned fabrics, flowers, and rooms. Stills extracted from the moving footage serve as the starting point for these works.
Oil paint – invented because we are flesh – has entered the picture and brings more than simply the translation of digital image fragments into another format. It is more than just paint on canvas. And less. It is about colouring complexion, the entre-deux between surface and depth. With this move towards oil, Plaschg continues the perennial dream of painters: paintings of bodies as bodies. She not only paints flesh, but treats her paint like flesh itself, not as superficial make-up, but as pulsating matter. Her new pictures depict bodies based on cloths not as cloths, colourful clothes, or coverings, but explore the art of metamorphosis.
Every representation, like every claim to authenticity, is a wager. It asks for the world to appear less random, for any unpredictability to be considered suspicious or abnormal, within a rationalized spectacle whose outcomes are ultimately never truly unknown. Plaschg’s paintings enter into this wager of representation. Do they have a choice? Especially when faced with professionals of the superficial, such as those in viral make-up tutorials, or hyper-real, internal imaging procedures, such as those used in gynaecology? However, the artist’s paintings extract a different rhythm from the visual code of our simultaneously immediate and highly mediatized visual world. Her translations of blurred digital images place their stakes on the unknown. A grid of sharp-edged stripes stretches across several works, making it difficult to see the depth of the images. At the same time, it does not provide a stable surface either, aware that ultimately it is precisely this instability of the flesh that pushes the colourist to her limits.
Pro choice!
Why do you ask?

Original text in german
by Tonio Kröner

Completely Envious, 2024 (detail)

Completely Envious, 2024 (detail)

Evelyn Plaschg – Rapid Babies, installation view

I love your face, 2024
Oil on canvas
140 x 90 cm

I love your face, 2024 (detail)

I love your face, 2024 (detail)

Mammals, 2024 (detail)

Mammals, 2024
Oil on canvas
140 x 90 cm

Modest Life, 2024
Oil on canvas
140 x 180 cm

Evelyn Plaschg – Rapid Babies, installation view