"[The Counter-paralypse] spends his time in withholding the decisive utterance of his doctrine, concerning it he gives us only examples, seductions, 'appetizers'; the message of his book is the announcement of a forthcoming message: wait a little longer, I will tell you the essential very soon."
"[the Counter-Paralypse] other than that it obviously translates the neurotic fear of failure (like that of a man afraid to jump - which [transferred] to the reader, uttered as the mortal fear of pleasure) points out the vacuum of language: caught in the toils of the meta-book, his book is without subject: its signified is dilatory, incessantly withdrawn further away: only the signifier remains, stretching out of sight, in the book's future."
The drawing’s tension exists in abutting the vacuum of architectural rendering's lifeless code against imaginations breath; skeptical over imagination's "excessive valuation:" that sensitivity without rigor breeds the horror of poorly painted flowers.
Architecture’s schematics are anti-subjective, existing as math's equations: drawings intended to translate ideas and space into code: an image that also acts as instructions. It also jettisons the general contractor’s subjectivity so that (in its ideal world) any one contractor and all contractors are the same, drains them of their subjecthood, as only drones able to set the architect’s thought into stone. The architectural drawing transforms bodies into computers of schematics, into orders, into ordered world. Architecture in this way makes concrete a singular subject onto the real world, denies you freedom through the existence of walls. When Schlepp presses imagination into the grate of clarified transmissable architecture, the object represented bleeds, fracturing itself in the limits of codified architectural space.
For Schlepp, Axonometric perspective (a common architectural rendering method for rendering dimensional objects on a surface) is bent. Instead, a flux of multiple perspectives represented on 2 dimensions. Literalized in the fore in the NE section of the gallery: Drawings of an wrought-iron serif carousel seen from 180 degrees, a black object whose subject suspends itself over the course of its ribs; the section is presided over by a drawing/xerox: an exhumed bookpage’s highlighted passage. The drawing describes a cornice of Rodin’s Gates of Hell in which the gates’s molding, modeled as the wings of an angel, morphs “in a sweep of drapery” into both the body of the doors and also the “serpentine pattern” of the fallen woman (caryatid.) On the same page a Rodin sketch depicting a crossection of molding whose silhouette, according to the books caption mimics “a nude woman,” (next to which Schlepp has placed another collaged-on cross section of what might be molding or what might be something else, but the caption is in italian, saying something about adders, and while Rodin’s sketch looks barely feminine, this collaged on cross section is something else entirely, perhaps screaming clown, perhaps something else) each item pointing at the other in standoff.
The highlights interpret the text, fray its edge and draw a latent thought that multiple subjects can exist within the space of one, embedded within a “sweep” of view, able to morph. The drawing shares its insight with a past artist. The drawing presents a hypothesis for a possiblily to render multiple subjects in the same information: nude, wings, moulding, and serpentine gilded caryatids, can all be contained within the same architecture/object, an instance of architecture as either subjectively holographic or surrealist. It claims an architecture outside the 1 + 1 basis of “form and material = building/object.” Breaks the schematical code in which, even if unrealized, a project drawing’s already contain their perfect conceivable existence. Fault lines form whose fuzzy breath allow “hinges” to be filled with mortar as potential, confusion, gap, breath. A surrealist "architecture" whose form isn't so much at stake but its unconscious construction by a viewer. An architecture whose baroqueness blooms with its capacity to be conceptually modular.
Its barely thereness reinforcing the subjectivity of its and your breath, to not concretize its abstract, “replete with hinges" elusivity. The show at all points risks utter dissolution into its own fog, counterbalanced by moments in drawing of utter specificity.
Its meekness, might be understatement, simple elegance, and somehow reminiscent more of an ampersand than violin. Suspends its object over the course of it ribs, unable to be broken into its constituents, postponed.
The Press Release's Airtight Garage anecdote, the comic of which Schlepp's insistence to know nothing about builds a dead end to segregate itself from biography's mythos, cutting off lines of referential interpretation from which much critiscism/stakes are drawn. (A garage without subject becomes...)
Counter-Paralypse: a big Barthes word for his simple, elegantly articulated concept, framing the show. It describes the refusal of an essentialist aboutness: instead of climax: suspended end, possibly blue balled, an endless deferral of itself into what it would hope as valency's (attractiveness’s) erotic suspension.
"Aboutness" instead withdraws into its own insulated world devoid of static fountains of traditional "signifiers," or reference. Trades them for syntaxes and modularity, drawings whose charts consist only of diagrammatic punctuation (arrows, variable x, braces, asterisks, brackets, parentheses, and arrows) moving more of themselves, that only themselves move things, without thing, only more deferring, endless agency without agent. Thrown into a sea, sink or swim.
In another drawing, disembodied hands, reminiscent of Mickey Mouse's character's hands in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Fantasia, which cause major hubristic damage.
The drawing's gloves point and move in swirls (& footnoted zig zags) and complete their cycle over a face whose holes for eyes create both a mask before you and yours. The hands conduct with asterisks. The drawing’s caption states "(A) Facial Managerial (Symmetrical/a)," implying a maestro's or possibly marionette's magisterial control over two faces at once.
Next to it: a drawing whose caption reads "(B) Axometrical Managerial (asymmetrical),” and depicts either an exploded view of a house, a house with invisible walls, or a series of rooms attached by rods to a central spinning axis. Below it is a quote attributed to mathematician Paul Erdős: "God I will call the supreme fascist. (You will never win) but the purpose of mathematics is to keep his score as low as possible."
