Luca Frei

When encountering the work of Luca Frei the formal relations being played out on a material and compositional level instantly start to echo with the incorporated fragments of signs, words and texts to explode into a whole plethora of resonating images and potential stories that are never taken to any kind of narrative closure. These works consciously re-connect with the formal legacies of abstraction re-phrasing them not only in a delicate, but also ‘impure' equilibrium that is shot through with the threads of mo-dernity's neglected left-overs. They take up the grammar of modernism without emptying it out as a ‘style'; they keep the critical edges of modernism alive without muting them as a dogma, re-activate their politics as a question to the present without proclaiming it as an ideology. Daniel Pies