In his seminal novel Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley already saw art as a way of overcoming the limitations of everyday consciousness. He saw it as a bridge to transcendent reality.
Miguel Cardenas' colourful, figurative paintings convey this spiritual energy even without the use of mescaline. Zdenek Felix describes them as 'seemingly post-surrealistic', as Cardenas combines 'set pieces from classical modernism with collaged elements of the present'. In the spirit of the art theorist Leon Battista Alberti (*1404 - †1472), who regarded painting as "an open window" ("una finestra aperta") through which the viewer gazes upon a section of reality-in the case of Cárdenas, a fantastical one.
Konrad Hanke's demolished, ral grey server cabinet doors (Cloud Rapture, 2023), on the other hand, have a dystopian effect. As carriers of collected world knowledge, they can be seen as gateways to a brave new world through misdirected data streams. Whether the bunker door (Doors seem futile, 2024) is functional and still needed seems unclear.
-Kai Erdmann
