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INSIDE THE BRICK
2018


CENTRAL FINE presents Inside the Brick by Christoph Westermeier. This is his first solo exhibition at CF, and his second presentation in Miami Beach, after a one-night performance at Between Arrival and Departure in 2017.
The works at CENTRAL FINE bring to mind a mise en abyme, reflecting images within images, at once hermetic and generic, defined by cuts and filters; as if entering the multiple structures of a nightmare, where perception swallows itself, blind and deaf, full of ID.
This is a dangerous dream and Westermeier walks and walls us through it, signaling the abyss of the brick, its depth, and our tendency to self-exile and isolation. Perhaps the liquidity of the brick (Like the liquidity of the word, or the eye) solidifies blinding masks that indicate simultaneous temporalities and shape-shifting facades.
Pockets, legs, pillows, doors, green malachite, the brick on a maligned intimacy, and the immersion into what sketches power and its structures; are all called upon in a poetic move, carving out a tiny hole?

In Italics, a text by Christoph Westermeier:

'Inside The Brick' stands for a discussion between a Flâneur and objects in a Potemkin village.
The Flâneur is detached from time and space and walks secluded on a horizontal line. He is in close contact with Siegfried Kracauer, W. G. Seblad and Daphne Du Maurier. His points of reference are the objects he encounters, which he sees as accomplices on his tours. In these objects the Flâneur finds friends who help him to enter society: An ashtray is his ticket to a late roman banquet as well as his constant companion on cruising tours through Vatican city or a handy helper in Napoleon III Second Empire.
Power structures are the counterparts the Flâneur has to deal with. While his true friend Jean Des Esseintes (“À Rebours”, Joris-Karl Huysmans) turned away from reality, the Flâneur made a deal with power structures: Realizing that rational organs experience his dialogue with objects only as a monologue he moved on to a Potemkin village. In this illusory world the insides of bricks have the same narrative power as paintings by Niele Toroni. While power structures keep vertical control of this construction, the Flâneur remains on his horizontal tour, talking to paper, walking through a propaganda show by El Lissitzky and listening to Shostakovich music.

Christoph Westermeier, 2017-2018

INSIDE THE BRICK
Installation view CENTRAL FINE, Miami