Jan Pfeiffer

A large-format print of a chessboard drawing covered with scattered objects, as mute witnesses to a dramatic play just ended, with straw bales placed around. This is the basic outline of Pfeiffer’s installation which, on the first plane, points to the symbolic meaning of play as a meeting and a match of opposing forces inside a defined space. The chessboard itself has traditionally symbolized the alternate influence of all basic dualities and complementarities in the world of phenomena: negative and positive, night and day, male and female elements, time and space, as well as the movement of life fluctuating between good and evil or happiness and unhappiness. Pfeiffer also appropriates some of the hermetic symbols, always doing so in a deliberately arbitrary way, thereby undermining the gravity of the conflict and relativizing its implications for both parties involved. It is as if these noble, symbolically loaded props were put into the hands of someone who barely realizes their true meaning. Someone like a child who is only becoming acquainted with the usual function of the thing. Against a banal backdrop, surrounded by straw bales, this person makes a number of errors and infringements of the rules. And perhaps because the person misses many things, their actions are liberating.