Florian Pumhösl — Fidäl Study Fidäl Study is a series of six plaster paintings in smaller format. Here the artist draws on elements and possibilities of the Ge’ez script (also known as fidäl), used for contemporary Amharic as well as Tiringya. Starting from single word constellations in Amharic, here the artist was interested mainly in the phonetic value of the signs, in the sheer sound anterior to the word, and even to the sign. A literary strategy, “defamiliarization” – as coined by Russian formalist Wiktor Schklowski – can be seen as the point where meaning ends and seeing begins, or where signs morph into a poetic layer. The first group of reliefs, a series of eight large-scale works, is based on drawings by the artist. The marks they feature draw on elements from architectural drawings, signs designating beams and openings as well as compositional definitions of borders. Another reference for the series is musical notation, where vertical “objects” punctuate the passage of time on the horizontal succession of the bars. Read in the context of a physical space, they bring to mind a horizontal formation or a series of hanging objects. The field between formal abstraction and signifying potential has long been a major preoccupation of Pumhösl’s, and in recent works he has been increasingly interested in notions of innuendo and insinuation, especially in the context of “defamiliarization”.