Using drawing, video and sculpture, Dennis Scholl (b.1980, Hünfeld, Germany), explores the convoluted possibilities of displacement, pleasure, psychological relationships, and, ultimately, the use of art.

The neutral and mind-clearing experience of walking the well-ordered routes of a maze requires a sort of surrender to the experience on the part of the wanderer. One can’t very well explain why it’s nice to walk and walk and walk in a labyrinth or maze, but the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, would have probably said that the emotional, psychological and physical emptiness that ensues in the maze offers a sort of pleasure that’s free from meaning or interpretation. He called this pleasing emptiness the Sinthom.

Manifestly interested in the state of mind, this young artist presents a collection of work that, though vibrating with an upsetting malevolence is engrossing and bewildering rather than provoking. With incredible precision, Scholl’s drawings map the psychological connections between people, objects and spaces, activating them and drawing them out through time. These “events” in the drawings and videos trigger a kind of user-experience that could best be described as labyrinthine.

So here, in Scholl’s first New York offering, there is a sculptural form reminiscent of Dürer’s truncated cubical stone from Melencolia. There are fast drawings and slow drawings. There are cells from an animation laid on the floor. There is a woman with a conduit coming from her behind and entering her friend’s mouth and then becoming the tangled wheels of a bicycle. There are boys floating against a wall of Murano glass tiles becoming a powerful/less triumvirate. There is no narrative line, though a certain chiastic order appears and recedes in the repetitive motifs. This show is purposefully opaque.