VIENNA.- “A house can be drawn 20 centimetres or 400 metres high,” says Constantin Luser. “There is no limitation in drawing.” He sees it as a process that starts at a certain point in order to eventually elude control. “Having no preconceived concept sharpens one’s eye.”

Luser (born in 1976), winner of the BC21 BostonConsulting & Belvedere Contemporary Art Award 2007, is presenting the exhibition Handlungswolken – Clouds of Action at Augarten Contemporary. The Graz-based painter shows large drawings – new pictures in which he combines drawing and painting, the walk-in installation Augenfahrt – Eye-Trip, and his Vibrosaurus, almost ten metres long. The saurian built of brass tubes the artist obtains from trumpets, trombones, tubas, and French horns, constitutes a multi-voiced “sound body” that can be played on by up to thirty wind players.

Luser develops his Denkstrecken – Lines of Thought – primarily in his drawings. He covers large areas with tiny graphic elements, causing them to overflow, meander, condense, and dissolve. Similar to electronic data streams, he organises his drawings as traces and fractals of information units. With his fineliner pen, Luser works his way through micro and macro views of architectural structures, scenic arrangements, snapshots, and storyboards. Closeness and distance are brought onto one and the same level of perception; faces, muscles, and blood vessels gather around construction elements or cityscapes, developing into a map of a ubiquitous visual reservoir that time and again alludes to the artist’s own biography. “So that this exhibition will be a success, yes, yes,” one can read in tiny letters in one of the drawings.