Florida Räume

We seem to be standing on the edge of a swimming pool looking across to its far side. Or perhaps we are in it, sitting in the shallow end (there is a sign on the other side indicating the depth over there is 7 foot). It is an outdoor pool, with buildings from the house it belongs to off to the left. The house is sited in a lush tropical landscape, and behind a raised terrace, trees proliferate and interweave with each other. Outdoor furniture is dotted around the pool as are various sculptures. Off to the right Rodin’s lovers embrace near the metal stair you use to climb out. In the foliage three of Brancusi’s Endless Columns sprout. The pool looks like it is waiting. Waiting for you to make your move and dive into whatever the next moment in this series of overloaded present tenses holds.

The scene is from a painting by Alina Grasmann, titled Bestiary (Room 8). A related painting, Untitled (Room 8), seems to be of the same location but from a different viewpoint, from up on the seated terrace of the first painting. Two clocks that have seemingly escaped from Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory are draped over a lounge seat and a wooden rail. Each floppy, melted camembert of a clock points to 2.22, a time that is seen in other clocks that appear in Grasmann’s series Florida Räume. Time seems to have frozen in these paintings but also expanded to allow us to take a different seat in the same scene without the clock ticking forward. That moment of frozen time connects the six paintings, three large-format and three small-format, that make up Florida Räume. Grasmann conceives of each pair as a “room,” or a distinct space, perceived from two different vantage points. The rooms lead to or look out onto other ones, making it theoretically possible for the viewer to “walk” from one to the other.

The titles of each painting invoke the writings of the Argentinian fabulist author Julio Cortázar. Bestiary, the title of one of the paintings, is a short story by Cortázar in which the protagonist spends the summer at her aunt’s house, which seems like an ordinary bourgeois residence except for the fact that a large tiger roams the premises. Servants and family members constantly report which room or part of the garden should be avoided. Two different realities—a familiar one and another in which a tiger moves incongruously free—are layered on top of one another. Aside from the titles, Grasmann does not directly reference Cortázar, but the sense of apprehensive strangeness and overlapping versions of the present that permeate his writings equally infuse her paintings.

In There but where, how (Room 10) we are in a room that looks out onto the foliage seen in Bestiary (Room 8), with the three Brancusi columns viewed from the opposite side. Their appearance, together with other art historical remnants that drift into the scenes, is a little like Cortázar’s tiger: objects that should not belong to this particular moment, yet seem to have wandered in from another dimension and insist on remaining. Multiple realities overlap within a single instant of time, an effect heightened by Grasmann’s virtuosic hyperrealist technique. Realism is deployed to depict a multiverse of realities.

Motifs such as the Brancusi sculpture recur, though often in altered forms. A small note attached to the window in There but where, how (Room 10) reproduces David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash. Hockney’s swimming pool imagery escapes its own frame, shimmering across the wallpaper of the café in Untitled (Room 10). A neon sign in that work reads “ALWAYS OPEN,” yet the café is deserted. Perhaps every moment we inhabit is more open than we imagine—to the past, to the future, and to the innumerable other presents that continue to haunt it. As T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets:

“Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future…”

Text by Niru Ratnam, originally published for the exhibition Florida Räume at Niru Ratnam Gallery, London, 25 May – 24 June 2023