INA GEISSLER AT PATRICK HEIDE

Time Out, Apr 15 | On the exhibition "Trapped Fallen", London 2008 | Francis Gooding

Unlike painting, architecture does not suffer from the tedious problem of having to be classed as either abstract or ‘figurative’; like music, it is pure presence - it is hard to imagine an abstract building, and buildings are not expected to show us a landscape or a person’s face. Under normal circumstances they either stand up or don’t, are either finished or under construction, are fit for their purpose or poorly suited to it. The distinction between abstraction and image is not relevant. Kandinsky didn’t think it was necessarily relevant to painting either, saying of his abstract work ’I prefer to call this art concrete. Without figurative subject matter, a painting becomes more like a building: a concrete object in the world that is not a picture of something else.

Perhaps it is interesting then that Ina Geissler chooses to walk the line between abstraction and image by addressing her painting to architecture.

‘Trapped Fallen’, her first solo exhibition in the UK, is a confused welter of grids and bars that criss-cross the paintings and veer away into uncomfortable abstract arrangements. This is figuration in breakdown, a jagged and fragmenting architecture that generates claustrophobic non-spaces: the ‘trapped’ of the title is apt.

Stuck in an anti-constructivist nightmare of falling girders and shattered glass, one either seems to be looking down into a grey abyss of broken lines and gaping holes, or up through a angular steel forest to a distant sky. Structures without structure, places without location, these paintings are neither wholly abstract, nor are they figurative: they seem to be a difficult vision of what might happen if you refuse to abide by those traditional codes.