Converted Chemical Laboratory with Storage Facility / Experimental Prize Pig Setting 30 x 60 cm / 11,8 x 23,6 inches, oil on canvas (prefabricated, “Stylex”), 2020
A painting, unusually tall (like modern cell phone), yet making up for tallness in smallness. Chinese inspired, in particular by the painter Shitao, the style being of course only a travesty of sumi-e, for the conversion into badly managed oil paints. Also, the painting ground in this case is industry-prefabricated and pre-primed canvas on stretcher, not paper scroll, hand mounted in fabric for either hanging in a museal context or storing in rolled form, stacked in shelves, to be perused by fellow art lovers, like books. However, the difficulties of endeavoring transformation and westernization by using oil paints on canvas make for intriguing results in terms of plastic surface effects (not well observable in photographic reproduction). A detail view shows better what is meant:
Observe how pencil line replaces insufficiently controlled brush strokes, creating not only optically observable lines, but also tiny grooves in the toothpaste-white of the supposedly tiled cladding of the storage building.
Please see also this post from 2009, with a design originally called “Bion Fermenter on the Eleventh Moon”, here moderately titled “Proposal for a Bion Conerter“.
The Unexamined Brutality (of the male Libido), 70 x 50 cm, Oil on Canvas
This painting seems to hark back to times when the male libido was seemingly more unabashed and comparative innocence (or unabashed guilt) reigned the abusive intercourse between the sexes. The aesthetics are reminiscent of surrealist inspired propaganda imagery. Phallic forms abound. One sea shell stands, or lies, in lieu of the womb. One could argue that the central phallic form of the outer shell of the engine’s boiler is actually esemplastic in not only being the threatening phallus, but also the tubular receptacle hollowness, awaiting the phallic thrust of another longish form entering (see the old chuckle arousing locomotive/tunnel imagery). The ?-voiced Commentator “ex”plains: seeming nostalgia for simpler times does not thinly veil, but starkly outline the fact that we today live in the age where all old violence and abuse bears fruit. The true objectification of the woman takes place in the immediate future which is our presence. Groping will soon be replaced by more sophisticated (and cowardly) methods of abuse. Think about artificial intelligence being furnished with female faces, names, voices. Some are discussing whether these undead freaks should be taught to give more assertive responses to weather queries mixed with risqué innuendo and sexual abuse. Few discuss who decided that “virtual” assistants need female voices and whether it is not a very small step for the brutality of the male libido to then confuse the (universal) assistance offered with the liberties allowed by sex-slavedom.
Woman’s Medical Centre with 1886 Benz Patent Motorcar (Oils on canvas on wood, 50,3 x 62,8cm)
Photographic reproduction of a painting which is positioned somewhere on the borderline demarcating the difference between the entirely satisfactory with added interest, and one of the lesser efforts in the field of true painting. Due to experiments with the preparation and priming of the canvas, the behavior of the paint was unexpected. Thus the execution lacks fluency. The technically inferior quality of the photographic reproduction adds to the impression of a very strange atmosphere permeating the picture, ambiguously oscillating between moodiness and objectivism. The symbolism; moon, spiral, car, and brick, is rather balanced, but with the addition of some sea shells, it is clearly shifted into the realm of female reproduction. (Of course, this is based on highly untrustworthy assessments of gender-classification of objects. Ed.)
The building does, or at least did, actually exist, somewhere on the British Islands. The photocopy of a photograph of the building from a book on Brutalist architecture garnered at the Düsseldorf Central Library some 25 years ago exists, yet, due to negligence, lacks any inscription for further contextual elucidation of the source. So neither information on the architect nor the actual location of this interestingly proportioned edifice can be provided, much to this author’s disgust.
Waukescha Natural Gas Generator for the Eastern European Region and Asia (45x34cm, oil, spirulina, and glitter pigments on canvas mounted on wood)
This painting, as subtly alluring in its pallette as in the choice of special and unusual pigments, cannot be adequately represented in photography (even when captured with a sensor especially suited to register finest colour nuances without sacrificing exactitude and focus). In fact, even the human eye is a sensor too coarse and surface-bound to understand that painting in this case is not only the coating or covering of a surface with paints of appropriate consistency and opacitiy in a way which concentrates too much on the where and too little on the when, but the loving and time consuming application of a multitude of layers of different degrees of opaqueness or transparency. The ultimate goal is not recognizable or symbolic representation, but the creation of an image with depth, in which even the first insecure tracings and irregular activities of a tentative and searching brush are still detectable under a potentially limitless number of successively applied layers, each adding its own share of happy accidents. The resulting depth is never a strictly two-dimensional and optical phenomenon. The true painting of value always has unique and custom made surface characteristics. The author of this painting is indebted to the teachings of the late Bob Ross, but chose to go the way of stretching production time instead of compressing it. By doing so, he could circumvent the adverse effects of a rushed production, namely that the perceived overall quality of the product suffers under a glance more scrutinizing and resting than fleeting and cursory. This painting is intended to satisfy on the happy accident level as well as on the level of more method-result based western observation systems striving for overall recognizability, structure, and order.
