Tempo House presents both new paintings and the latest iteration of Nikholis Planck’s concept of a “nightclub with no overhead.” For the duration of the exhibition, the paintings in the street-level gallery remain in place, while a changing cast and series of performances and events in the (_hr) club vibrate in the lower gallery below them.
Tempo—the speed at which a piece of music is meant to be played—is denoted by speci c mark- ings indicating the actual duration of the time values. In painting, Planck sets a pace of urgency and uidity of time. Tempo House is not only meant to impose a sense of order, rhyme or reason but also to shed light on the potential for disorder and misinterpretation. For him, there is no right or wrong way to execute the actions and movements; painting is akin to a piece of jazz music which can be played and construed in various ways.
Within art history’s manifold expansions, painting is an open dialogue, an ever-festering wound to sooth. However suspicious of painting’s place at the top of artistic hierarchies—Planck remains in- vested in the medium while questioning its bound- aries. His self-referential approach calls upon past projects and recycles previous works to produce and continue new arrangements.
In canvases scrawled with “the attempts of paint- ing” Planck presents his own post-mortem of Painting’s cadaver. For him, any work empties into another. e catalyst is the painting’s support and surface, into which he collages sculptures, discard- ed canvases, posters, and reclaimed wax. e built- up layers, like troubled-skin, are then embedded with information from other paintings upon which he conjures recurring muses and motifs. Stretch- ing across painting, sculpture, performance and editions, his work is rmly rooted in the observa- tional drawing tradition while balancing a state of constant flux.