n the work of the Austrian artist Peter Kogler we see the realization of a utopia or, at the least, the realization of said “realization.” The infinity there represented by various elements, the purely geometric forms which are always slightly deformed and which transform into half-geometric half-organic fi gures in a chain of images digital of an ant reproduced and multiplied to infi nity, of a brain and its stylized representation…all these elements are montaged in rhizomatic structures, sometimes psychedelic, in networks that cover museum walls during the Documenta X or people public building facades with a parade of giant ants. Utopia is thus the representation of infi nity through this construction of a network that covers the entire world, an idea which is rendered by the materiality of Kogler’s work: his geometric and organic figures, concrete and abstract, are generated by computer according to absolutely random chance. But it is also rendered by the subject of his work: the labyrinths extended in a space unknown to the spectator; the ants that, in their multiplication, invade public space, metro stations, the city and its communications networks; these half-organic half-geometric forms come to resemble each other as the pages turn in a paradoxical movement that gives place to their own original scene, the division of cells in a biological laboratory. As the pages fl ip by the reader-spectator can appreciate the numerous references hidden but present in Kogler’s work, hot round forms that, in spite of their dimensionality, look like Brancusi sculptures or even the lightning that rips Barnet Newman’s paintings that we find in digital form. But what is most striking, perhaps, is the eternal reproduction of the same element, the same form, fi gure, image that places Kogler’s work in the minimalist tradition. Minimalism discovered the power of repetition that generates eternity. Utopia in Kogler’s work follows this search for eternity generated, today, by infinite chance and the ungraspable logic of the computer. Repetition of the same, which is nevertheless contained by the covers of the book that resemble, in a surprising movement of chaotic synthesis, all the elements that separately people the pages of the book.
MARIA MUHLE, Paris

Peter Kogler
01
Published October 2004

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