Dead Father Institute in Chinese Landscape

^{Dead Father Cryogenic Institute in Chinese Landscape, 30×60 cm, oil on STYLEX prefabricated canvas&stretcher}

This is another effort in a planned series of paintings in the classical Chinese style. Based on elements from Ming Dynasty landscape paintings, it features a Cryogenic Institute, a stylized 1920 Ford Runabout, a family of water buffalos, perhaps the C.O.D. – appointed custodians of the Dead Father Cryogenic Institute, a storage facility for the dead fathers of a past human civilization, first featured in a ca. 2003 airbrush painting as the “Wilhelm Reich Cryogenic Institute”. The narrative of legendary purport of the painting is however only a pretext for a kind of painterly exercise, in the style of what the civil servants in various Chinese dynasties turned to painting as a kind of unpaid profession (a very much glorified hobby), and their masterworks were often mere exercises in the style of a colleague in another part of the huge empire. These paintings were scrolls, and mostly stored in shelves, to be unrolled, like books, to be scrutinized, evaluated, perused, in solitude or together with esteemed guests. Eventually, they ended up in one of the Emperor’s huge art vaults, who had a strong believe that his empire was only as strong and long-living as the art works created under its auspices by its servants.

This painting is of course permanently unrolled, mounted on a mass produced stretcher, painted in contemporary oil colours. It is in this way only a nostalgic simulation, but also an exercise.

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Way to Work – Strengthening the Links between Active Labour Market Policies and Social Support

_{Way to Work, 9.1 x 12.6 inches, pencil on yellow carton, 2022}

This drawing is the recreation of a drawing from 30 years ago. That drawing was nearly identical in composition, but the figure was fully dressed. While the original was not found, presumably lost or sold, a photocopy still existed, begging in its inferior quality for the undertaking of making a new drawing, a handmade copy of the remembered original, coming as close as possible or even surpassing its original craftspersonship (perfectionism/youthful folly). Actually, even though slightly larger than the original A4, the technical execution is inferior, no doubt due to use of single mechanical pencil with HB mine and tip size 0.3 mm instead of multiple finely and variably sharpened wooden pencils of different grades.

The original clothing of the depicted person was first executed, then, by means of an eraser, removed again, and the nude body reconstructed, to achieve something of an Helmut-Newton effect, with a tint of irony perhaps, as the depicted person is not really the preferred Newton body-type. There was the idea that this could be a sort of nudist yoga teacher, but the muscular tonus is not there, nor the general width of the core which normally results from yoga practice. 

The source of the depicted setting is not clearly remembered. In all probability it was inspired or rendered from a photograph of an architectural decoration project by Victor Vasarely somewhere in France, either a shopping centre or university campus.

The following is a non-realized passage concerning dress codes and where nudism would or could be placed on a scale between “casual” and “formal”. 

Please observe the extant photocopy of the 1994 original:

First version (copy) “The second Idyl” A4,  ~1993

Drawing and text © 2052 by Torsten Slama and the SHY Laboratory Group