Central to the work of Cédric Eisenring is the issue of narrative. He examines the narrative potential of artistic media such as printmaking, drawing, sculpture and installation. In the process, he frequently draws on existing storylines from film, literature, comics or children’s books and weaves them into new fictional and visual narratives. History and present, fictitious and real space interleave in his works as a result of their particular presentation in the exhibition space.
Cédric Eisenring’s works on paper are created in elaborate, multi-step processes. He employs classical printing techniques such as photogravure and drypoint, generates the source images from computer drawings or reworks the prints with pencil and crayon. This results in collage-like pictorial inventions in which familiar and less familiar visual references appear and figures, forms and landscapes overlap. The fairy tale-like, fanciful quality of the images is further underscored by the manner in which they are presented.
Eisenring displays the prints in boxes, cordoned off or «protected» by a canopy of sorts. These surprising modes of presentation blur the boundaries between the fictitious space of the image and the actual space in which the works are displayed. The artist pursues a similar approach in his architectural interventions which similarly create fictionalised spaces by breaking the patterns of neutral presentation in the white cube.