Reinhard Reitzenstein

Reinhard Reitzenstein’s protean engagement as an artist has involved exploring the nature-culture paradigm. His art has taken him along many carbon-neutral pathways, and his footprint on Canada’s arts scene is enduring. In 2000, on a hill overlooking an historic site where the French and Indigenous peoples used to trade above the La Gabelle Dam on the Saint- Maurice River north of Trois- Rivières, in a sublime statement, Reitzenstein strung an inverted 65-foot white spruce tree between two hydro pylons. Earlier, Reinhard had expressed solidarity with Indigenous peoples, using sculptural installations at the Woodland Cultural Centre at Six Nations in Brantford (1992). There is always that Romantic vision of Nature under the surface of his aesthetic, always with a critical understanding of what humanity is doing to nature and to bioregional cultures worldwide, most notably with Memory Vessel. This was a gesture of healing when the nonindigenous, colonially introduced eucalyptus trees reduced water tables, due to their deep root structures. Staged in Santiago, Chile, in 1994, 12 bowls were carved into a eucalyptus tree, then cut and fit back together with beeswax from Canada and Chile. Each bowl was alternately filled with pig’s blood, beeswax and cow’s milk—olfactory and visual senses were stimulated by the healing sculpture cum action.

“The Forest at 4 am,” Reinhard Reitzenstein’s latest show at Olga Korper Gallery, references Alberto Giacometti’s surrealist sculpture The Palace at 4 am, 1932, with all its primordial unconscious associations. Contrasting Giacometti’s sculpture, the frame in Reinhard’s is made of vine branches cast in bronze, and what hangs tendentiously within is a fragment of a tuckamore tree from Newfoundland. Giacometti’s human spine becomes the spine of a tree seemingly anthropomorphized, and recalling Reitzenstein’s earlier Carolinian Synthesis, 2000. This piece fused multiple human spine forms to a tree, a true culture-nature inversion, shown at the Rodman Hall Arts Centre in St. Catharines, Ontario. With “The Forest at 4 am,” the difference is the cage-like structure that is culture and the subject within is nature, as this tree fragment hangs hauntingly like a sacrifice, or a corpse.

Zyklus, 2017, is a spherical “wrap” of continuous vine branches whose ends spread like tentacles in the open space within its form. The sense is of nature’s endless procreation cycle of life, as forms emerge out of forms. Knothole, 2017, is a more complex articulation of forms, with a beaver-chewed stick gilded with 24-karat gold leaf, a carved beaver skull and a wood support base. Smaller wall-placed works like Tuckamore, 2017, and Keels, 2015, are renditions of mushroom growth on trees, with miniature tree-like branch forms atop. Like small gardens of introspection, these integrated bronze-cast assemblages feel contemplative.

Central to the show are Reitzenstein’s drawings of coastal trees from around the world, each a survivor of extreme weather conditions and a model for resilience in an era of climate change. Each is a composite entity made entirely from the words for that tree’s name. Recreated, replicated in microscale, each tree’s drawing required the artist’s wearing two pairs of eyeglasses to draw / write the images with a .005 point pigma micron archival ink pen. While writing each drawing, Reitzenstein intones the actual tree’s name in a mantra-like incantation. He says, “I am sending my support to them in my own small way, to help them to persist and survive.” The larger drawings require up to 50,000 repetitions of each tree’s name and, like a mantra or tone poem, the act of replication and ritual becomes a meditative performance action. With titles like Jeffrey Pine, Monterey Cypress, Torrey Pine and Juniper, the drawings have the schematic, idealized feel of AJ Casson’s landscape tree forms. Reitzenstein’s drawings exist in blank white space.

Arbores Magnas Fac Iterum, 2017, a grid/cage made of roots and vines, has endings that extend upwards in a growth pattern and is the most intriguing and challenging of this exhibition’s sculptures. With its geometric/biomorph forms intertwining, it is a sculpture that fuses aspects of procreation and recreation, synthetic and natural forms. The sculpture proffers a fusion of a futuristic synthesis of nature and culture. As Reitzenstein comments, “Reality is not composed of discrete or isolated building blocks but instead composed of complex webs of relationships, layered, interrelated and interdependent.” “The Forest at 4 am” awakens a primal sense of our unconscious and eternal connectedness to the nature of which we are inevitably a part. ❚

“Reinhard Reitzenstein: The Forest at 4 am” was exhibited at Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto, from March 2 to March 25, 2017.

John K Grande’s most recent book is Nils-Udo; sur l’eau (Actes Sud, France, 2015). He recently curated “Small Gestures” at Mucsarnok / Kunsthalle Budapest in 2016.