Roland Fischer

In his third solo exhibition at the gallery, artist Roland Fischer (Saarbrücken, Germany, 1958) presents recent works from the series Transhistorical Places and New Architectures, establishing a dialogue between different ways of representing architecture. In Transhistorical Places, Fischer manipulates images of buildings through an abstract composition of planes and shapes, intervening in the original photograph. In this series, brutalist architecture merges with gestures and forms from 20th-century concrete art, creating a fusion that reflects the utopian impulse of these two artistic movements: the hope for a better future, grounded in the desire for social and aesthetic transformation. On one hand, this relates to the brutalist aesthetic, characterized by the use of raw materials with a monolithic, solid appearance. On the other hand, it connects to modernism, with its totalizing profile, which is part of a system of thought deeply committed to both the democratization of art and the use of art as a tool for social change.
From the image of the building, with its hard lines and textured spots, Fischer assumes the role of painter by overlaying lines, spots, and textures that add new layers of meaning to the work. These layers not only alter the perception of the building but also establish a subtle contrast between the real and the imagined. In this way, the artist moves between photography and painting, highlighting the pictorial dimension of the image and, through the intervention, translating the sensory and spatial experience of the building. In this process, a contrast is established between the minimalist aesthetic of modernism and the idea of rescuing the imaginary. This approach can be linked to the poetic philosophy of Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space (Martins Fontes: São Paulo, 1993, p. 63), where he evokes the idea that architecture is the "geometry of dreams, the houses of the past, the houses where we will rediscover, in our daydreams, the intimacy of the past." Therefore, what Fischer aims to show is how buildings impact us as a language of communication, where social dynamics, historical experiences, and memories take on essential value. To an austere approach, the artist juxtaposes a poetic image—the world of imagination.
Fischer demonstrates how the visual narrative creates tension between abstract elements and the underlying photograph, offering a contrast of intense tonalities and deepening the dialogue between the real and the imagined, bringing the work closer to a pictorial experience rich in meaning. Many of these works do not refer to a specific building but to an environment where stylistic elements are associated, forming a discourse that allows the identification of a place. One example of this is the curves, circles, and the contrast between yellows, grays, and blacks, which immediately evoke the urban landscape of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
In New Architectures, Fischer adopts a compositional technique inspired by cubism, combining photographs of a single building captured from different angles, which are then reconfigured into a single two-dimensional plane. This approach allows multiple perspectives of a building to be presented simultaneously, creating a new visual language. The iconic shapes and lines of the building are deconstructed and reorganized, offering a reflection on the discourse that characterizes that building—its stylistic elements and how they communicate. Again, the use of abstract lines and the insertion of intense colors in the composition amplify the character that places the work in the realm of the imaginary, creating a vivid contrast between abstract elements and the photograph.
By intervening in the photograph, Fischer retrieves the language of painting, manipulating forms and textures, layering them to intensify the aesthetic experience of the work. The contrast between smooth and rough surfaces, transparencies and structural lines, colors and chiaroscuro, enhances the pictorial dimension of the image, translating the spatial experience of the building into a deeply subjective visual language. Thus, in both series, Roland Fischer offers a sensory and poetic perspective on architecture, in which the images are reinterpreted and distorted to show how buildings and places communicate and evoke memories, emotions, and individual perceptions, transforming physical space into a visual language laden with meaning.