Daniel Hug is pleased to present Eli Langer’s third exhibition at the gallery titled Petit Mal.   For this exhibition Langer presents a limited selection of paintings paired with a video projection and sculptural element, together forming a constellation of works in different media that generates a singular environment.  Over the course of its run, the exhibition will remain open to potential additions and alterations by the artist. Langer is interested in the possibilities of an ongoing installation and the notion of continual fluctuation, as is vividly apparent in the permanent mutability of form and line in the video  ‘Bender’ and more subtly evident in the paintings’ cumulative material development that can be destabilized by the viewer’s perception.  There is the hope that paintings can slip out of their static, dry state in the act of viewing and the conviction that the video’s fluid wetness can aid this slippage.

The figure of the moon, as nocturnal reflective body of light, hovers over this installation of separate works, orbiting around the video projection’s fixed shot of white linear forms fleeting drawn on the black surface of water by reflected moonlight.  The intense rapidity by which moonlight whips around the water’s contours is spellbinding.  The shift between nature and artifice is explored as a function of perception changing over time.  Cropped like a large canvas, this common natural phenomenon is represented here as a singular experience of an abstract surface, registering a striking visual affinity with Langer’s painting practice.

Langer writes: “considering the possibilities of the video and the paintings acting upon each other as balance and counter balance, restlessly the digital pursues the analogue - right hemisphere and left hemisphere brain functions split the mind’s load. Pushing on each other and the resulting reciprocal momentum.”

A painting charts the duration of the artist's process extended over a surface, a temporal experience which Langer understands as a warping of time's normative fabric.  Laboring in the studio so that temporal slippage can occur, Langer attempts an act of evacuation in his work – evacuation of figuration, narrative expectation, cliché, and self-consciousness.  Erasure and excision are important conceptual concerns, visualized in the pared down expanses of paint barely interrupted by hints of form and line and the smearing of wipe-out brushwork.  Painting aspires to becoming a petit mal: the flash of a seizure lasting only a few seconds in which self-conscious activity is suspended (absence seizure) in a state of arrested and elevated time, like tweaked glitches or short circuiting from electrical malfunctions.  In the narrow window of the petit mal, painting happens in blind, irrational, and involuntary spasms.  Marks are minimal, both sudden and meditative. In the throws of a petit mal, staring spells are characteristic, bringing on an almost child-like condition of fascination and staring into space which the viewer may experience while concentrating in front of Langer’s deceptively simple paintings and hypnotic video of moonlight bouncing and reflecting on an open body of water.