Roland Fischer’s second solo exhibition in Lisbon will show his latest work from the series Façades, New Architectures and Palaces and Cathedrals, drawing a map of synthesized images collected from across the world. Façades establish the minimum unit of the visual form as a code to global contemporary architecture. It could be a façade of a bank in China, a school in Holland or a bank in Dallas, in all of this, reality is subtracted to a visual composition like a modern art painting. He crops the external surfaces of contemporary architectural buildings, neutralizing the surrounding reality by putting together constructive and ornamental elements so the result can be a pure plastic and abstract fragment. In sum, the artist tries to understand architecture as painting in its formal principles: color, rhythm, shape, shadows, composition, patterns, to show how globalized culture has a common universal vocabulary. In his series New Architectures and Palaces and Cathedrals Roland Fischer performs a technical procedure in order to emphasize the composition obtained by the mixture of formal elements of architecture. This composition is made simultaneously from many vantage points and is placed in different frames in order to bring out the subject's essence. A delicate and disturbing composition of lines, textures, rhythms is placed into a two-dimensional image developing a new stylistic vocabulary. Fragile intimate lines are expanded into a deep and complex repertoire assuming figurative traces or more abstract lines. In this exhibition, two different ways of looking at the spaces are developed. The first way reinforces how the architectural space uses the same codes and elements no matter the physical location where it is positioned and its very distinctive characteristics. In the second way, Roland Fischer depicts the physical experience of place through visual compositions. What you see here also is the artist’s perception about the places he visits. The images are not limited to reporting the buildings themselves, but to show the artist’s emotional empathy towards them. This exhibition draws a map of interpretations of images from “Granada to Shanghai“, showing how we see ourselves and how we see our world.
