VIENNA.- The expression “hidden agenda” has a questionable connotation. That makes sense as the framework of a society is often based on ideals of truth and honesty.

The trouble is that not all of our ambitions are helpful when publicly revealed. Our psyches, just as society—and in it, galleries and artists—need private space. Basic fears and desires are kept behind allegorical closed doors.

We can even expand the allegory of the door: if we add walls, we have a room, or even an allegorical house with several rooms (including a basement and restrooms)—some of them hidden or closed off. The very idea of art is that it has the ability to represent some of our underlying and less obvious motives.

The works of Stano Filko and Franz West both produced psychological landscapes. They formulated subjective realities with universal qualities. The lump in all its manifestations played an important role in West’s formal vocabulary. Like its figurative sibling “the golem”, a basic sculptural form, it preempts all forms to come. There is something comical in that, to the same amount as it contains endless truths. The banality of chairs pointing in different directions can mean everything, nothing, or just the tautology that it is open for discussion.

West and Filko relied on simplification, not only in the immediate way they treated material and colour, but in the way they mimicked the world. Filko divided reality down to five dimensions indicated by colours to create his metaphysical system. These dimensions are then populated by words, objects, and Ego’s (selfs) and again subdivided. The simple symbol of the ladder and the rocket can be seen as vectors pointing upwards as possibly overcoming some of these worldly divisions. Hidden Agenda imposes itself onto the works of Filko and West, suggesting an artistic subconscious, creating one of many possible worlds.

Emanuel Layer
Hidden Agenda: Stano Filko and Franz West
February 1 – March 23, 2024