Galerie Gegen & Lücke // „adventures on the mind scrap tissue“ by Fabian Hub

Let’s set out on a wander through the city: we take our bearings loosely from its boulevards — those avenues cut through the landscape by administration and planners when this place emerged from nothing, or into a prior, spontaneously grown disorder. Between the main roads, traces of what once was can still sometimes be discerned; narrow alleys snake into the inner parts of the blocks. It’s along these paths that Fabian Hub’s work takes the viewer. “adventures on the mind scrap tissue” shifts perspectives — from an aerial view down into the lived worlds of the people who inhabit a city.

At the beginning — and giving the cycle its title — stands the triptych “adventures on the mind scrap tissue.” The work is a hybrid of painting and collage, a technique Hub has used before. Its foundation is an intuitively developed grid made from found papers — documents — which he overlaid with layers of paint and additional papers, applied and removed in turns. It appears as though Los Angeles were spread out before us. In the foreground, similar blocks converge towards a central vanishing point on the horizon. Above them, so it seems, rise ranges of hills. Plan and perspective complement each other to form a classical motif — one with a disruptive expression.

The surfaces of the works recall billboards, on which poster is layered upon poster until the paper fuses into a leathery substance. It tears in places. Through the holes of one layer, the colours and information of another shimmer through, and together they form something new. Facades and streets age in the same way: plaster or asphalt crumbles. Brick is laid bare and gnawed by rain, sun, and the turning of the seasons. In potholes, the layers beneath the road’s surface push up into view. Relentless traffic continues to erode the edges.

With “Mind Scrap Journey 1–18,” we dive deeper into this universe. The series of triptych canvases is a cartographic reproduction of sections of the cityscape. Structurally identical, Hub plays out the coordinate-traceable “quarters” in variation — much as a street corner is a different place at 8 a.m., when the fruit seller arranges his wares, than at 2 a.m., when the revellers stumble over the curb. Hub explores spaces of possibility, and his intuitive process lends each fixed state a hint of the countless others that preceded it in the process of making.

With “A Piece of Guidance,” a door opens inward, behind the facades. The rectilinear gives way to a concentric grid. Two human figures incline towards one another. Perhaps we have entered a bar. Or perhaps we are peering, through a sci-fi-like optical device, through the wall into a neighbour’s room. Whether the conversation is a balanced one can only be guessed from their posture — the title suggests otherwise. And so the counsel may enter the counseled, take root, and spread. Filling or clouding their head — like the genie from the bottle.

“Magnet Tar Pit Trap” shows the captured djinn — the wish-granting spirit that may equally be a thought. In this vertically arranged triad, the concrete meets the abstract. The work bursts its grid, breaking all given structures into angles that could become either escape routes or labyrinths. On our walk through the city, we have arrived in the minds of its inhabitants — and in our own.

Hub’s play and breaking of rules can be read as an inquiry into space — both physical and mental. The ability to open oneself up is always bound to the limits one encounters, which cannot be torn down. Within those confines, Hub searches for resonance, for the mutual influence of parts upon one another. People walking on a sidewalk divert the paths of others. And as much as we wish otherwise, we are, in many ways, frighteningly non-autonomous : the flight of starlings sweeping across the sky in autumn as a zwarte sol, the schools of fish that seem programmed to split as a diver swims through — the pulse of life is regular, reproductive, omnipresent.

Elements that make this immaterial resonance visible have appeared in Hub’s earlier works: he uses sound and water. Here he presents “Soundscape,” composed of the reed plates of an accordion, and, in the rear section of the exhibition, the “Grid Disrupter–Interference Engine.” The two-meter-high column abstracts the union of grid and vibration to its ultimate degree. It is an autonomous system, endlessly reflecting and questioning itself. The modules of the lamps mirror themselves in the surface of the water. One waits for the perfect moment — yet a constantly falling drop keeps shattering the image. Rectilinear and concentric grids compete for perfection. And so all that remains for us is to discover beauty in their interplay.

Text Josepha Landes