Xingxin Hu’s solo debut at Peter von Kant in London comprises seven oil paintings that chronicle pleasure and pain in interstitial moments of surrender and dispense. Close-ups of faceless figures in a subdued palette, these intimate portrayals of interpersonal relations deal with themes of authenticity and vulnerability. Hu’s paintings begin as coups de foudre. As fleeting sensations – like a first glance, a raised eyebrow, or the faintest of smiles – that can change the course of life forever, for better or worse. Hu chronicles these so-called “shades of the soul” in her paintings. Imagine a painted version of Nathalie Sarraute’s 1939 novel Tropismes, a collection of anonymised and unrelated character studies.

Like Sarraute, Hu captures the complexity of the self in its visceral and brutal honesty: it is through her cinematically derived compositions with cropped frames and close-ups, an enigmatic choice of colour and organic slathering of paint, and the realistic and almost clinical precision that Hu transcends the absence of interactions in her paintings. Her intimate portraits appear preconscious, like a mental universe for which psychological terms have yet to be invented. Not to explicate or analyse these so-called shades of the soul – for Hu does neither – but to become an instrument of language that transcends the limits of her own critical discourse.

Yet, it isn’t the first time that Hu has crossed lines: she originally trained in advertisement before shifting her focus to art, and traces of that occupation are still evident in her painterly practice: for instance, she continues to paint from film rather than from life, often beginning with screenshots that she uses as reference images. As a result, her paintings retain a sense of the observational quality of a filmmaker, evident also in the close-up format that hints at activity just outside of the frame. This tactic emphatically directs our attention to the details that have been carefully reproduced, like the racing green shadows on the settee in The Girl in Red (2023). Yet, the emphasis in Hu’s paintings is not on the film sets and props but on the people who perform in them, making clear what exactly has commanded her attention. Though the people in her paintings engage knowingly, and in many cases overtly with the eroticisms of BDSM and other kink practices – such as the reclining woman in The Girl in Red bent headfirst over an armrest – Hu’s portraits are far more ambivalent about the portrayal of these specific sexual practices than their photographic or cinematographic counterparts, as if registering the shifting ground between artistry, documentary practices, and imagination.

Nudity is often conspicuous in its absence: it is implied through various stages of undress – like the jade silk bikini in Synthetic Mind (2023) – but not shown explicitly. Hu’s paintings exude a soft eroticism. For instance, the people in Hu’s paintings never seem apprehensive. They appear dignified and comfortable in their implicit moments of intimate pleasure, liberated from consequences and morals. Their actions appear realistic and plausible as they enter rooms, embrace each other up, undress again, or bend over armrests – traces of which they display for the viewer – but not for sexual gratification. As Hu only ever alludes but never indulges.

Nevertheless, the decision to keep her figures dressed is a pointed one, calling attention to an alternative reading of physical intimacy beyond the squinting eyes, dropping jaws, and contorting cheeks of orgasmic pleasures. By teasing out the myriad ways in which these chronicled couplings defy traditional organisations of the body, Hu’s paintings chart an alternative mapping in which different body parts – not just the protruding bottom, the perky poitrine, the flushed bite mark, or the red-painted toenails – present a site for creating momentary pleasures. She insinuates these couplings through a visual lexicon of ordinary and innocuous items of clothing, such as tight tank tops, silky bralettes, cotton briefs and bikini bottoms, or high heels. Close-ups thereof activate a shift in the power dynamics from agency to anonymity and abstraction, such as the leisurely unbuttoned blouse in Formal Education (2024) or the tight tank top in Citrus Fruit (2024). Though Hu’s compositions appear ostensibly more conservative or chaste than the explicit photographs of Jimmy De Sana or Robert Mapplethorpe, they are no less urgent or precise in their realistic renderings.

There is another dynamic at play: anyone unfamiliar with the erotic art film references – which is to say most of us viewers – will spend much of the time wondering what exactly is being shown. While the people in the paintings know what they are doing, we – the viewers – have to catch up with their hidden desires, secrets, and yearnings. Here, Hu practices a kind of withholding: she does not offer any insight into the lives and identities of the people she portrays. There are no explicit references to films in her titles, and the viewer is given little in the way of context. Yet Hu does not deny the specificity, individuality, or texture of their lives, only our access to them. Rather, she puts them under a microscope to inspect these interpersonal encounters up close. Soon it becomes clear that zooming in doesn’t reveal more about a situation. Rather it eclipses and conceals and shrouds details in secrecy. As for us, Hu has flipped a coin and we might as well take her close-ups at face value and see them as a subtle but significant cue about the way we eroticise bodies in popular culture, the way they are shown on camera, for whom, and to what end.

As for the exhibition’s title: In Champagne speak 'extra brut' is a marker for sweetness or better the lack of it. This description fits Hu’s paintings just as well, as the Hunan-born and London-based artist does not sugar-coat. Rather, her diaristic intimacies luxuriate in this unflinchingly brutal honesty and visceral vulnerability, with just the faintest note of sweetness. And while bubbles of that first sip of Champagne pearl over our tongues, we can but think of Hu’s paintings as the echoes of yesterday’s desires, today’s kisses, and tomorrow’s secrets, of fleeting moments etched in our minds and memories forever.

Maximiliane Leuschner, 2024, for the show Extra Brut at Peter von Kant.

Zully Mejia’s paintings are direct. She announces people. Here she is, facing me in a red pantsuit. Here is Syeda at her podium. My gaze is zoomed in on her. Syeda isn’t looking at me, but she acknowledges me by focusing on an implied crowd with me in it. Here is a woman in her kitchen, smiling in my direction. I am caught in the act of looking back at her. There are the spring rolls. There is the pan. There is the blue flame. There is the owl. I can imagine the person in the painting going to the shops at some point and choosing this owl. “That will look good in my kitchen.” she might have said. “I enjoy those orange eyes.” She is depicted so clearly that I imagine her having preferences, deciding to use a yellow cloth rather than a blue one, loving the owl, selecting the limes in the bowl.

The gaze that separates this woman from the painter also separates her from me. Mejia seems aware of the fact that paintings have thresholds, and that her people might cross them. I look at her self-portrait, He wants to erase me, with its Barkley L. Hendricks sense of scale. There are the very feet the artist will use to step out of that painting. I see how she emphasises them in black so that they stand out from the red clothes. In No te des por vencida Zully. Eres resiliente como aquel árbol. Aunque la vida te ponga pruebas difíciles y a veces te caigas, eres luchadora igual que tu mamá y seguirás adelante. Deja que la naturaleza cure tus heridas. Ahí encontrarás paz., a calmer picture, she removes her feet, covering them with grass. “I needed to paint myself in this environment before I could go out and actually be in nature. It's like artist Zully was telling Zully the person what she needed to do in order to feel better,” she told me in an email. She added that these two self-portraits were painted at the same time. One of them makes her confront you; the other relieves her of the responsibility for confrontation. I suspect that her sense of healing comes not only from the open countryside but also from the fact that she has given herself the grass for a shield. The landscape offers her opportunities. She could turn aside and walk into the open plain or visit the mountains. But He wants to erase me gives her nothing to escape into. The white surroundings imprison her with the compulsive utter freedom of a void. Her red clothes are chosen to look at least somewhat expensive and dressy – a conscious presentation of self-worth. Not so in No te des por vencida Zully. Eres resiliente como aquel árbol. Aunque la vida te ponga pruebas difíciles y a veces te caigas, eres luchadora igual que tu mamá y seguirás adelante. Deja que la naturaleza cure tus heridas. Ahí encontrarás paz., where she wears a t-shirt and jeans. You can feel an undercurrent of common sense saying, “Put your jeans on friend, or that grass will make you itch.” Restfulness and healing aren’t free of real-life consequences in Mejia’s oeuvre. It’s a sign that she wants the effect of her work to be real, to be concrete. It’s the common sense of the kitchen. Yes, the woman in front of the stove will need her limes for cooking. There they are.

Lacan floats by in the distance, murmuring about “the gaze” and “the eruption of the Real.” But theory feels like the farthest thing from these paintings. They are driven by sincerity. “I always get permission before painting someone,” Mejia told me, “and it’s important to me that they feel good about the work.” This sensitivity towards care extends to the objects she puts into her images. Is a man going to feel comfortable lying on blank space? No, so he needs a couch. The woman in the kitchen likes her owl, therefore she has her owl. Mejia bestows and she also requests. The title of Take me homeeeeee is an explicit cry. She would like to go home to Las Vegas now, to the city where this woman, the Lola of a friend, is doing her cooking. In that title there is a hope that people can give one another what they want.

She joins a blossoming field of painters who find their subjects in communities that have been historically neglected by Western art. Who has not been painted? Black and brown people and women with agency. Then that’s what she will paint. Her personal desires present themselves in public as fairness. What is that sense of fairness like? Communal feeling is a large part of it. She tells me Immigrant was inspired by very personal feelings of displacement and loneliness aroused by the memory of her migration away from her native Peru at a young age, but the title is a deliberate attempt to open that experience up to others. “I titled it Immigrant as opposed to Peruvian Immigrant though because I felt this was an experience that others could relate to, even if they are not Peruvians who moved to Las Vegas.” Three years ago at the East Las Vegas Library she put together a “self portrait” exhibition consisting not of paintings of herself, but of paintings of women who were her role models. Self is a concentration of parts. (One of those paintings, a depiction of her mother, is currently hanging in the offices of Representative Susie Lee in Washington, D.C..)

Mejia approaches what-should-be (fairness, equity, comfort) through what-is (real objects). Is it right that people think girls only play with pretty dollies? No, so here is a Spiderman figure and a baseball with the pointed title Artefactos Femeninos. When she wants to show her displaced state of mind in Immigrant she does it by materialising the representative figure solidly. The solidness is not in the material consistency of the paint – she doesn’t make her people fat with chunky brushstrokes – but in the appearance. She has faith in the power of seeing a thing. As a painter, she is the one who can make things be seen. Behind her oeuvre there is a voice that utters, “If I show you this, then things can change.”

D.K.Sole, 2022 for the show Neglected Narratives at Peter von Kant

For his first solo show in the UK, at Peter von Kant, Maximilian Siegenbruk presents a new group of artworks drawn from an ever expanding wider project developing a vocabulary of unique relief panels, each of which may be combined in almost endless ways with others to make larger artworks. Siegenbruk describes these panels as like tools, or an alphabet of elements to discover, to think about, to write, so to speak, the relation of nature with its uses, its consumption in the universe of human artifice.

The title of the project of Maximilian Siegenbruk’s work, from which the art on show at Peter von Kant is drawn, is Idylle Dekonstruktion, which translates as idyllic deconstruction. Deconstruction, what’s that about? You might know, it’s a term that came to prominence in French philosophy decades ago through the work of Jacques Derrida, which had philosophical and critical implications, but which became a sort of buzzword for post structuralist chic, not least in the art world of the 80s and 90s, and now it’s a kind of everyday expression. There’s a company which takes buildings apart called Deconstruct, and it’s an everyday of TV cooking competitions – the deconstructed cheesecake for instance, disassembled. Siegenbruk’s work is not of the order of cheesecake.

Derrida’s philosophy drew on, and responded to, a French philosophical tradition coming after the Hegelian philosopher and teacher Alexandre Kojève. Kojève’s Hegel followed an idea that there is a kind of dialectical progression in the world, that raises things up, but also gathers everything together within this dialectical process of elements opposing, interacting, joining, to make a system that is absolutely totalising, folding every difference into the same of this system. And Kojève also gave a place to the idea that ‘the word is the murder of the thing’. It means that once we name things, once things are caught up in language, they tend to become things of language, and by relating to things through symbolic signifying systems, such as language, we lose our relation to the thing in itself. And from this point of view, the idyl of nature is never just what it is, in and of itself, always a bit subsumed in our experience by the language, the systems, through which we apprehend it. A famous psychoanalyst once noted in this regard that if elephants are endangered, it is precisely because the elephant as such was a bit lost already by having been rendered into language. And on the contrary, in language it is very difficult for elephants to die – we don’t need the physical elephant for the idea of an elephant to live on. We does not need the existence of an elephant to sustain the elephant in being a signifier, a word, an idea. We don’t need the elephant itself any more than we need a unicorn to have the idea of unicorns. The idyl of nature is not without being taken up, changed, lost, in the words, the structures, through which we cannot help but grasp it. And that seemingly totalising dialectic which interested Kojève, well, that’s something that is made of words, of the system of signifiers, and the way the world is taken up in words. Siegenbruk is keen to note that the nature he depicts is not a nature in itself, but one filtered entirely through language, and with the meshes of his desire.

Derrida didn’t entirely agree with Kojève’s version of things. He was interested in this world of words, but didn’t believe in this totalising power of the dialectic, didn’t think that it adds up to a totality. Rather he was interested in the way the symbolic system of words never quite adds up, is never really homogeneous. And this idea was taken up in a sort of critical idea. The idea of a process that highlights the heterogeneous aspects of the signifying world. Derrida took up this as a critical project, calling this idea deconstruction. It’s an approach to relentlessly refuse the push to think of the world taken up in language as a totalising and totalised system. And there is a persistent aspect of Siegenbruk’s art that sustains this sense of systems which contain elements that emphatically differ and defer, which refuse to close into an impression of final totality.

The works that Siegenbruk is showing at Peter von Kant are constituted by a group of modular wall based reliefs, of set dimensions, designed on a computer and revised in virtual reality, made in a most technically demanding way with 3D printers, moving in and out of imagery drawn more or less loosely from nature, and then prepared in a great and unexpected variety of ways – some left in the vividly coloured polyester they’re printed from, others painted or coated with a variety of techniques in a variety of ways, often with a sort of synthetic appearance which for an example might reflect the surprisingly synthetic appearance of some beetle shells. Often vibrantly clashing from one panel to the next, each panel differs from, and relates to each of the many others. Some have patterns of locusts or frogs emerging from the surface field of the panels, others are irregular patterns of what could be leafs of grass, worms, the surfaces of the great variety of anemones found on coral reefs, or indeed any number of natural phenomena viewed at a variety of scales. There is a proposition that a buyer could arrange these panels to amount to a total size of their choosing, and in an arrangement of their liking, although they may want the arrangements already shown too. The arrangements shown are titled beyond Siegenbruk’s numbering system by which each panel is identified, for instance the largest of the combinations shown at Peter von Kant bares the polyvalent title of Fatal Attraction. There can be any number of other combinations, and other titles with them. The constant reference to nature in Siegenbruk’s work, with its ceaseless push of ever shifting production, is never without an emphatic relation to the artifice through which it is indicated, as ‘tools’ or ‘alphabets’ as he describes them.

Among the first things that Siegenbruk told me was an anecdote from his college years. A tutor asked in relation to these assemblages of small panels whether he was not scared of large paintings, to which he retorted that perhaps he is scared of small paintings. Indeed there is a sense that these panel combinations could become large towards infinity, or to whatever limits to scale they meet before that point, and some of Siegenbruk’s panels are really rather small. What is telling about the anecdote is that it points both against settling for an answer that seems to define the work too one sidedly (they’re made of small elements because large is scary), but also that it speaks to a dimension of something being at stake for Siegenbruk in this work. There’s also here an aspect of infinity, expansion out to the limit, even if the maximum Maximilian will provide in practice has a limit, or in its counterpart, infinitesimality, the infinity of division towards the infinitely small, even if there is a practical limit to the smallest panel Siegenbruk makes. There is a fixed system that establishes the boundary by which the infinite may be considered, and allows an emphatic resistance to any totality that this could come to imply, this seems consistent in the work.

Deconstruction certainly has an aspect of seeming a bit dry. An intellectual response to an intellectual problem. There is a dry aspect of Siegenbruk’s art, but in another way it is really anything but dry. There is a palpable push to find the ways in which his system both works, and falls apart at the level of a supposition of its totality. I asked Siegenbruk if he thinks of his work as having an aspect of wit. He pointed to a sort of joke hidden in one piece from another set of work, and said he’s not quite happy with it. He doesn’t respond to the idea of humour in his work. I noted that witticism or, to use the German expression common to Siegenbruk and Freud, witz could be understood as not the same as a joke. It need not be funny. Siegenbruk was a bit sceptical about the idea that this is what his work does, so I told him one of Freud’s witz.

Freud’s witz, are not necessarily funny. Funniness is not necessary. For instance here’s one from Freud’s book on jokes:

‘Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. “Where are you going?” asked one. “To Cracow”, was the answer. “What a liar you are!” broke out the other. “If you say you're going to Cracow, you want me to believe you're going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you're going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?”’

It’s witty, but not funny. What is the logic of a witz? What’s important about them? A witz is a saying that breaks with expectations, it makes a new idea or thought come unexpectedly into view, it breaks with the sense of inevitability of what is familiar, and is allowed to do so. In this witz of Freud’s there is a surprising doubling up of negations, such that we can’t be sure whether one character is upset with the other, or feigning it to mark affection (or both) when he tells the other that by saying that he is going where he is indeed going he must be up to mischief thinking that the first person will think the second is going somewhere else when in fact he is going where he is indeed going… it’s original and a bit preposterous. The truth itself is not entirely the truth, but also a lie. But insofar as it succeeds as a witz, it’s not preposterous at all, since its originality, its novelty is given a place as a witz, and not just rejected as nonsense.

Allowing that we’re not in the world of wit per se with Siegenbruk’s art, nonetheless we’re not so far from the logic of this witz, with a 3D printed panel which represents grass representing worms representing anemone painted in the beautiful sheen of a beetle shell which looks like the paintwork on an exotic supercar. Siegenbruk makes a sort of lying truth. If an artwork is too big it is not without it being made of element too small, and so on. And in place of the permission of a witz, we have the kind of permission that art can grant to such new creation. These are artworks which if they are light-footed and delightful, are also not without their weight. We know that in this game, as artificial as it is, the elephant is not less susceptible to being rendered extinct.

If Derrida was not known for his wittiness, this logic of the system which is not totalised, then it depends on a space for things which differ and defer in relation to that inexorable logic of totality. And this is what a witz does, and which art can do, and this is what makes Maximilian Siegenbruk’s art so compelling.

It is not I think clear that Derrida grasped that what gives consistency to the world is not a Hegelian totalising dialectic, but the consistencies provided by the push of a certain kind of enjoyment, a serious enjoyment. That certain kind of enjoyment to be had in Siegenbruk’s art attests to the serious style of enjoyment that pushes him in this singular project of his.

Alasdair Duncan, 2022 for the show Polylactide at Peter von Kant

In the faraway future, that is already here, a sound could be heard. At first, it is distant, almost imperceptible. It approaches slowly, descending from high above, where sagacious noctilucent clouds veil the atmosphere tenderly. Gradually, the sound grows in strength, alternating between a low-pitched ring and a hum, until forming a giant tide, whose crystalline sonorities roll confidently towards Earth. The waves come in a repeating syncopated rhythm without crushing into, but delicately reinforcing one another. As they reach the surface of the planet, they gently envelop the enormous coniferous forest in what was used to be called Sierra Juárez in the state of Oaxaca, swishing through the muffled rustling of rotting leaves and sprouting branches with their long sustained breath-like tunes fading in and out, in and out.

The forest hushes, bewildered. Never has Planet Earth, in its 4.6 billion years of existence, heard a sound like that – it is, quite literally, otherworldly.

Empty of human presence for over 30,000 years, Planet Earth is overflowing with lush greenery and rapturous blooms, as it finally lives up to its Edenic promise. Gaia is stunningly beautiful – even if no satellite captures her glorious image from outer space, so she can catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror of interstellar photography. The song of the kingdom come is sweet and mellifluous, perhaps overly so – evidently missing a few chords of human presence for a truly well-pitched multispecies polyphony (who would’ve thought!).

Humans would not have recognized many of the creatures now populating their former home: while certain floral and dendritic shapes would look familiar, others would stand out as completely extraordinary and baffling. As flora learned to adapt to new climatic conditions, new morphologies have flourished: triangular leaves, dark green on one side and almost totally white on the other, so a plant could curl its foliage at the hottest time of the day to prevent overheatingand uncurl on cloudy days, to conserve heat and prevent severe temperature fluctuations. Petals forming pipes, to direct excess water away from the tender pistils. Tendrils that dance their way towards ever-new heights in the crowded forest. Flowers arranged along non-Euclidean grids.

Colours, too, have transformed. Under the influence of increased radiation and extreme temperatures, new fluorescent hues have blossomed, shiny and translucent, polychromic and abysmal, enigmatic like Holbein’s azurite mixing and sampling moonshine reflected off butterflies’ wings and the light absorbed by the impenetrable depths of the Mariana trench.

The sound arrived, announcing its extra-terrestrial presence with a hyperdimensional embrace. Oh, the long-awaited cosmic advent! How humans longed for you, how they feared. The Other did not announce themselves in any other way than the outlandish hum. They were by no means immaterial, but they had no visible body, no form one could see and touch – only hear and perceive. Devoid of spatial extension, their consciousness extended in all directions, travelling as multidimensional waves, according to laws unbeknownst to human science even at the height of the age of quantum and cosmological discoveries. Albeit some scientists, those of a particularly mystical inclination, did know: they intuited the seemingly impossible astrophysical phenomena, but could not prove or demonstrate them empirically. Humans thus left, having their half-baked mathematical equations unresolved, and their greatest theoretical intuitions untranslated into the language of science. While they captured the cosmic microwave background, the radiation from distant galaxies all the way back from the time the universe was born, they could not decipher that some of this radiation was music. And some of it was God.

The Other arrived from the Occam Galaxy, and were thus called Occami. Not one, not many, but multiplicity itself, their sonorous body extending through the curvatures of space-time, running along the edges of deflections and black holes. They did not pose a threat to Earth’s nonhuman inhabitants or to the planet itself – but they did have a purpose, one they needed to communicate to Gaia gently, yet resolutely. Occami, who travelled for aeons before reaching the solar system, knew they were too late to meet the human race, but they revelled in singing their prayerful undulating song to the myriads of vegetal beings. They exchanged their astral tune joyously
with the flowers of the deserts and lilies of the valleys, with perennial vines and feathery mosses, with all the house plants and all the monocultures set free and re-united once again with their multispecies sisters 30,000 years ago.

At first, the Gaian flora gave off a signal of alarm when sensing the Occami approaching,but the fears were soon relieved, poisonous spikes hidden away, tender leaves unfurled, giving way to a full welcome and a resonant embrace. The Occami did not come to colonise, they came searching for a precious gift, the story of which their long-gone ancestors have passed on to them (while Occami were capable of travelling through space-time, they did not live forever).

Occami knew of special plants that human shamans used in the ancient ceremonies: on full moon, a medicine man ingested herbs specially selected for their healing, consciousness-expanding properties. As the plant entered the body, the healer merged with and thus became the plant.

In a state of vegetal immanence, the most magnificent shamans would build a verdant cosmic ladder to travel far and beyond, sometimes as far as Occam. Some of them have stayed out there and gave birth to a race of selfless super-conscious sonorous beings. Many light years later, children of Occam have come back to reunite with their vegetal mothers.

In gratitude for reunion with the sacred plants, the Occami offered their grand, transcendent, incantatory song, an eternity-long slide into blissful deliquescence, an ecstatic dissolution in all there is. Their offering to Gaia was the gift of divine music – the gift of themselves.

Aliya Say, 2022 for the show Rapture at Peter von Kant

The text is loosely inspired by the music of Éliane Radigue.

‘I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.’ – Maggie Nelson, Bluets

It began with an asshole.

I had stepped into Christopher Hartmann’s Deptford studio where I was struck by a painting of a bare male bum, framed close-up, impossibly pink and flawless. It had a strange kind of intimacy, very exposed, vulnerable and yet – revealing very little about itself.

It was a bright cold winter day, and no-one could know what was coming in just a few short weeks, and how strangely resonant Hartmann’s android-like figures would become in the new world, where we all bunkered down and dived deeper into the simulation of real life. There’s a consistent tension between arousal and despondence, eroticism and opacity, in Hartmann’s paintings. In this exhibition, aptly titled, Come so close (that I might see) Hartmann indeed gets up closer and more personal – a version of the painting I had seen appears here, a nude male figure who appears to take a selfie, searing pink against a blank turquoise background. But unlike the digital depictions we’re used to, Hartmann denies us easy image-consumption by erasing all the imperfections that make us real.

Hartmann knowingly plays with the paradox of seeing – the more he zooms in, the less we see, but the more we rely on our other senses; the beat of anticipation, visual cues that tap into less conscious readings of the painting. Hartmann suspends time and space just before some action seems to have happened or is about to take place; his figures – who are mostly, white, European, male, generic - inhabit this eerie non-space, like the disembodied avatars in an Ed Atkins video, empathetic and abhorrent at the same time. They are rubbery and awkward, their skin as smooth and perfect as a Pontormo portrait. “I deliberately bleach out details that would give the subjects too much individuality. Which reminds of digitally rendered skin or social media filters” Hartmann notes. In striving to be different, we often end up being the same.

His men gaze apathetically into the distance – their eyes never meet, and they never look back at us, or else their eyes are cut from the frame altogether - but they seem to know they’re being watched, desirous and desired. This tension recalls the eros of Antonioni’s cinema – the director, Hartmann says, has been a major influence on him. In this exhibition, the apparently disconnected vignettes form an unconventional narrative. Like Antonioni, Hartmann is interested in exploring atmosphere, and in particular, what has become a very contemporary feeling: isolation.

Even when his figures appear together, they look as though they are alone: in one work, Hiding until you or I forget a catatonic figure dressed in red lies on the grass, gazing towards the sky; lips almost meet in a synthetic kiss, a thumb hovers over a nipple on a phone screen – their touch “always oscillates between tenderness, rejection and eroticism.” This is vividly captured in a painting of two yellow rubber gloves, a symbol for our times, that imagines “the whole idea of proximity/distance and longing for touching/being touched; especially during this lockdown in which you’re too scared to get too close to someone else”, – as Hartmann puts it.

“My paintings are not about the digital itself but the subjects I depict are definitely conditioned by it”, Hartmann reflects. Hartmann too is conditioned by the digital – it’s where he gets his distinct palette and the flatness of his brushwork. His process usually begins by leafing through fashion editorials and perusing photographs for inspiration – he then reworks certain elements or minutiae in these source materials, using them as a kind of motif for staging a new photograph with friends posing for his camera. Then the experimenting begins: he amps up the primary colours and plays with the compositions in Photoshop until the decision is made about what is going onto the linen, the glow of the screens and the filters of Instagram seeping in via a bright yellow base layer of oil paint for the skin, or in the oversaturated grass and skies that recall default wallpapers on Windows XP – simulations of reality too perfect to believe.

Quarantine has compounded the coldness of our interactions, turned flesh into something ephemeral, far-fetched and made us contemplate the way our bodies met even before the virus. These are paintings about love and erotic desire, pain and loss in the age of contactless connections, where the touch and the gaze become sinister, even threatening. Hartmann keeps us at arms’ length, poignant and haunting, they speak of the impasse that separates us from one another, no matter how close we get.

Charlotte Jansen, 2020 for the show Come so close that I might see at Peter von Kant

“No one uses a paintbrush in the way that I do.“

Laura Aberham’s work is a homage to colour. She approaches the surface with explosive gestures, long brushstrokes and a multitude of layers of paint. More than expressing a deeper psychological concept, Aberham’s work lives and breathes through the concept of colour itself. Through the very physical use of paint, the artist finds her own handwriting to explain structure, form and space and manages to turn the two-dimensional painting into an almost three-dimensional body. In incorporating means of spaciousness and physical dynamic, she creates a sensation to the eye that reaches beyond the realm of the usual canvas.

The artist was born in 1994 in Düsseldorf, Germany, and studied at the renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, under the teachings of Jürgen Drescher, Katharina Grosse and Ellen Gallagher, all of whom have influenced her work in manifold ways. Her exhibition at Peter von Kant is her first solo show in the UK.

Anneli Botz (AB): You graduated from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf just last year, after only five years. Quite a fast pace.

Laura Aberham (LA): Exactly, five years are the minimum. There was a moment early last year where I could feel my mood swing. I realised I had to be done soon. I was simply fed up with the art school lifestyle, the slow pace. I asked myself what there was left to learn, where I would find my input now. As much as I loved and appreciated studying at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, I felt it was time for me to move into the outside world.

AB: Which is a bold move.

LA: I just had to take that leap of faith and see what happens. I think it was the right move because a lot of great things have happened since. I signed with a gallery immediately, exhibitions started to line up. This reassured me in my decision and prevented me from getting stuck in the slower pace of an artist’s lifestyle. That was never really my thing - to sleep until 2pm and then put one line on the canvas before opening a bottle of beer. I was always someone that would get there early to start working. I enjoy having a normal life next to my artistic work, where I can also go home in the evening and chill out, or meet friends. The lifestyle where it is art school or nothing does not apply to me.

AB: It is true that some students spend a lot of time in a space of contemplation in front of their work and then spend all day and night at their art schools. Everybody works differently of course. But you like efficiency.

LA: There is certainly some danger in the vibe of just “hanging out” and this kind of self- perpetuates this mode of being. It then often becomes more about talking about art rather than actually making it.

AB: Practicality is bliss.

LA: Exactly

AB: Were you one of those artistically minded kids?

LA: When others did sports, I painted. It was always like that. Nevertheless, it was not until my dad told me: “Laura, you are constantly painting. Why would you study anything else but that?“, that I actually considered this path more realistically.

AB: You got accepted at one of the best schools in the country.

LA: I got really lucky. The portfolio I had handed in included some naturalistic pieces and then some abstract variations of those. I wanted to show the full range of my capabilities at the time. And that worked out.

AB: Naturalism is currently not a thing in your art.

LA: When I was young my idea of painting was pure representation in its most perfect form. Which is normal for a child, I think. I was always known as ‘Laura that can draw and paint exactly like a photograph‘. So for some time abstraction did not even cross my mind. Art school really broadened my horizon and I learned to love the moment of the unknown, of the unplanned. When colour happens in a way that you did not foresee. So I slowly started to work my way closer to more abstract forms, first through collages, photographs that I would take analog and then apply to the canvas in enlarged fragments. Just to have some kind of representational structure that I could work alongside. And over time I liberated myself more and more towards a free and pure use of colour. I began to ask myself: “How can I influence structure through colour? How can I enable myself to accept randomness?“ It was a really liberating process, I have to say.

AB: You had three very renowned teachers.

LA: The most important phase was probably right in the beginning of my studies. At that time I did not understand the whole competitive mentality that is kind of standard at art academies, I guess. I was a bit shy in finding the right class and teacher. So I ended up in the class of a sculptor, Jürgen Drescher, who had nothing to do with painting. This experience taught me a lot as it also gave me a lot of liberty to create a sort of three-dimensionality in my paintings. My teacher wanted my paintings to function like a physical body despite being two dimensional. So that they can sort of move into the wall after all. It really helped to free my mind of pre-conceptual ideas.

AB: Later you joined that class of the famous Katharina Grosse.

LA: I was with her for two years. She is the goddess of abstract painting right now if you ask me, and I adored her work. During that time I was facing some internal struggles in terms of explaining abstract art to the outside world. People would always ask me for the underlying deeper meaning of my art. I hated that. But she reassured me that painting can be self-sufficient That it can be about painting in its uttermost form, about the expression of structure and space through colour. That it does not need to always be about a psychological concept, a political situation or some inner turmoil of the artists. It helped me a lot that she enabled a discourse within the classroom that actually dealt with the art of painting more than with the art of meaning. The final part of my studies was accompanied by Ellen Gallagher who is a very politically driven artist. At first I did not know how that would go as we do make very different art but she really showed me how a painting is built. She taught me that the way I paint can become some sort of personal signature. Even though there is nothing literal on the canvas, my paint is my own handwriting. This helped me to understand my own unique status as an artist. No one uses a paintbrush in the way that I do.

AB: The influence of Katharina Grosse seems undeniable when looking at your artwork now. Having such a mentor is a wonderful gift, but how do you, as a young artist, create your own identity?

LA: This is certainly a question I started facing when I was about to leave the academy. Finding this identity is an ongoing process and so is learning how to push the process of constant growth. To me it is important to keep a golden threat without ever stagnating. When I look at what I have created throughout the years, there is continuous change. I especially love where a different use of the surface has been taking me.

AB: You recently hung a beautiful monumental piece in a parking lot. Layers of plastic sheets with a multitude of colour.

LA: I wanted to distance myself from the wall and the canvas. One of my girlfriends at the academy, a sculptor, was working with these plastic sheets that I loved. She gave me some of her leftovers and I developed a system of three layers with colours where you can still see through to the wall to some extent. The material fit perfectly into the parking lot as well. I had to use varnish instead of paint which was a fascinating experience.

AB: Some of your artworks are large, and really large. I assume you enjoy doing those.

LA: Ellen Gallagher told me last year that she was seeing a lot of power and dynamic in my work. “I feel like you might need more space on the canvas”, she said. So I started to go bigger and bigger. This was a fundamental experience for me as I was not focusing on the whole image or the whole painting anymore. I mainly paint sitting on the ground and all of a sudden I became the painting. I was a part of it, working from the inside.

AB: This seems very physical.

LA: Most definitely! I love the movement, I love being with the paint, being the paint. At the end of the day I am often exhausted, but in the most productive way.

AB: How do you approach your show at Peter von Kant?

LA: What I find interesting about Peter von Kant’s gallery space is that he has, what I like toccall “fucked up” walls. We often thrive for the white cube experience but here I really enjoy mixing this up in a more rough space. The raw brickwork provides a challenge for me in how to incorporate my artwork. His advice to me was to either fight the walls or to try to blend in. I love these kind of challenges, and blending in is not what I want. My goal with this show is to manage to makecmy pieces stand out as an autonomous work of art that keeps its unique identity. The art shouldcbe stronger than the wall behind.

Interview by Anneli Botz, 2020 for Laura Aberham’s show at Peter von Kant

Zombie : The Walking Dead : Homo Coprophagus Somnambulus : A deceased human being who has partially returned to life due to undeterminable causes. The brain retains base facilities, namely gross motor function. In its near-mindless state, it grasps no remains of emotion, personality, or sensation of pain. In rare cases, some of the reanimated have reflexively preformed routine activities from their past lives.

The rotting bodies of the undead operate on a fraction of the level at which our bodies normally function. Circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems are unaffected by reanimation. Labored breathing, choking, and moaning are reflexive but no oxygen is carried through the blood. The nervous system functions primarily within the brain and brain stem. Sensory reception is minimal at best and seemingly unnecessary in the pursuit of prey. The undead are incapable of fatigue and will persist at any cost. They will even crawl when their legs have been removed. Even if the head is removed from the body, it will continue to live. The only way to stop the reanimated is to destroy the brain. To prevent reanimation in the recently departed, decapitate the corpse and burn the body.

The only observable action a zombie takes part in is killing living creatures, especially humans, and eating them. Many theories and speculations surround this disturbing behavior. One theory is based on the thought that reanimation is the result of a contagious infection or virus, and that the primal drive to feed will spread the disease to other host bodies. Research has shown that although the majority of zombie attacks result in fatal wounds, all corpses return to life soon after passing, regardless of cause of death. Another theory is that zombies eat the brains of the living to refuel the “un-life” giving chemical serotonin. Because digestive and circulatory systems are incapable of bringing these elements to the brain, this just cannot be true. The final speculation seems the most obvious, that the dead feed for sustenance to satiate their unnatural metabolism. But because the gut has no function in the undead, this is also false. One documented encounter claims that a zombie was unable to move due to the sheer mass of undigested flesh resting in its distended gut. The creature continued to eat even after its gut had burst open. Studies regarding the nature of feeding have proven that zombies will try to eat when their stomachs and even jaws have been removed. One explanation offers that the walking dead are the incarnation of death itself, a mockery of life that uses the vessels of the living to carry out their dark intentions, they are the opposite of life and are driven to simply undo it.

“When there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the earth.”

by X__x for the show ZOMBIES at Peter von Kant

Acheiropoieta are religious icons that appear miraculously, independent of the human hand. As truthful representations of their divine subject, most commonly the holy face, acheiropoieta act as the authoritative image from which subsequent copies can be authentically made. The contemporary model of image distribution resurrects this notion. As technology renders the origin ever more irretrievable, the miraculous and the mechanical become indistinguishable. Digital images travel through seemingly alchemic devices. Where the origin eludes us, we can interpret this as little else than magic. In their ubiquity, these devices, and the images they proliferate, become a focus of popular devotion. It is in their disavowal of human mediation that acheiropoieta are revived.

Though a product of the artist’s hand, photorealist painting forms a surface worked meticulously to the point of self-erasure. It feigns the machine-made. This mirrors an imitative form of magic, where to imitate what one desires is to produce it. The sense of an abstracted labour typifies that found
in the industrial propagation of imagery, where the machine replaces the human copyist. This is reversed in a photorealist mode of painting.

Sculpture maintains an enduring relationship with the copy. As motionless, easily lit and uncomplaining, sculptures were proposed as models to be imitated. In accommodating lengthy exposure times, it was among the first subjects to be photographed. Further extended into painting,

they are transferred weightlessly from one flat surface to the next. Henry Moore spoke of painting as a framed world into which we are imaginatively enclosed, whereas a piece of sculpture shares our realistic environment. Here this relationship is inverted. These monolithic giants are contained, divorced from the great landscape to which they are associated. The monumental is miniaturised.

In extracting and photographing cuttings of the great outdoors, Karl Blossfeldt presented natural forms mediated through a mechanical eye. Like the sculpture casts of an academy’s halls, Blossfeldt’s photographs were invitations to copy nature through premeditated observation. Intended as pedagogical tools for industrial design, his oeuvre underlines solutions that are already anticipated in nature. Nature is replaced with an architectural and mechanical likeness.They are miraculous in their detail, the work of a divine hand. Entirely new structural formations are revealed in their reproduction and enlargement by hand as paintings. The miniature is monumentalised.

Current techniques in photogrammetry allow the archival subject of the paintings to be extended beyond their surface. In the use of photographs to form three-dimensional digital facsimiles, immaterial casts of the paintings are extracted. Our attention is diverted from the flat plane and divided across illusionary three-dimensional surface. Here, a return to sculpture can be found. Paintings subjected to this process can continue to be endlessly reconfigured in their physical absence. The archetypal authentic and singular art object is rendered infinite. Herein lies potential for unrelenting proliferation and a further distancing of the artist’s hand. As the lineage extends and the origin distances, these motifs appear as if of their own accord. The multiplication of an image, far from diluting its cultic power, instead increases its aura. It is the viral image as deity. Here, acheiropoieta manifest.

Realf Heygate’s Acheiropoeita at Peter von Kant

Jack Otway’s paintings are part of an ongoing chain of association and meaning; the flesh-like surface of the canvas is treated as if it could become an inhabitable space, a porous centre of autobiography and myth. Otway’s subject is repeatedly removed and reworked as though held within an imaginary continuum that relies on the artist, a figure who combines and separates meaning in equal measure. Leonard is the reverential demon of nocturnal orgies and master of ceremonious unification. He is used as a caricature for the artist who orchestrates lurid and queasy-looking scenes by superimposing on and amalgamating a selection of otherwise unrelated material. Many of these works begin as recognisable images, selected from art history. Otway plays with recognition as a framework for understanding, or at least depicting, the lurking presence of something unformed, uncanny and, therefore, repeatedly attempted, rephrased and eradicated. Coming out of this cycle are provisions, of a sort, towards a new structure that threatens to change, disappear or slip once more into obscurity. We may understand these paintings as a platform for exploring the boundaries between representation and the material of paint, at once an apparatus for the synchronous production and dissassemblage of images.

Otway destroys, appends, restructures and alters the spectre of his source material through a combination of erasure and accretion. Whole sections of the canvas are effaced or concealed by Otway’s removal and layering of paint. In effect, Otway creates a conceptual veil as a way of simultaneously obscuring and disambiguating content, demonstrating the qualities of paint at the precipice of forming or destroying what can be seen. This can be compared to the surrealist Frottage technique, bringing out the uneven surfaces and qualities of an object by rubbing at it, physically transferring one form onto another. Otway’s paintings imbibe the same spirit of conversion: impressions of well-known paintings are used as the foundations for new and intriguing structures, bearing the ghost-like trace of their origins. In one painting, the figure of Caravaggio’s Narcissus is seen in the midst of a pigmented haze while a rectangular sheath covers a cropped and rotated study of Henri Matisse’s Dessert: A Meditation in Red, in another. We might read Narcissus’s murky reflection and the faded outline of Matisse’s interior as a totem for the instability of each stolen image; every painting has been over-written and manipulated, violently removed or displaced from its source.

Just as Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image, is unable to recognise his appearance as the object of his own desire, Otway negotiates the uncanny potential of each painting by exploring and complicating thresholds of representation, figuration and abstraction. On the one hand, these operative systems intertwine subtly as the layering technique creates a potentially binding and consolidating space for contradictory forms to hide or resurface. Seemingly heavy layers of paint are waded through or wiped away to reveal figurative forms, landscapes and still-life underneath; realistic shapes commingle with clouds of substance and absurdity. Otway exaggerates this difference, the gulf between realism and abstraction, by compressing and flattening these boundaries into a navigable space. We are given a figurative representation of Narcissus’s face, remarkable for its clarity of expression, while his reflection is reduced to a series of gestures, brush-strokes only vaguely recognisable as features. Rather than breaking down these dualities, Otway’s mark-making is a whimsical play on the possibility of merging these seemingly divergent ideas. Married to a sense of uneasy circularity, Otway’s compositions delay and warp our ability to categorise what is represented.

Although many of Otway’s paintings begin with images taken from the past, these reproductions contain a trace of what the critic Hal Foster has called ‘mimetic exacerbation’, that is, any work of art that inflates or distorts its subject to the point of parody. This technique is perhaps epitomised by Otway’s reference to the nineteenth-century Dictionnaire Infernal, a catalogue of demons compiled by the French writer Jacques Collin Plancy. In 1836, having recently consolidated his Roman Catholic beliefs, Plancy commissioned the artist Louis Breton to illustrate his descriptions of demons, of which there are sixty five. Breton’s illustrations incorporate the full breadth of Plancy’s descriptions and render demons as amalgams of human body-parts and bestial traits, positioned within a series of situations as if posing for their portrait. While Otway alludes to a number of actual demons taken from the Dictionnaire Infernal — including Leonard, namely — he also uses Breton’s etchings in the abstract, as a framework for thinking and forming an approach to composition. Taking visual cues from le Breton’s decision to accommodate a range of actions and conditions within a single body or setting, Otway uses the surface area of the canvas as a space for whimsical combinations of material and autobiography.

In many of these paintings, Otway frames his subject by wiping away a thin layer of translucency indicating the prominence of the base layer or original image. In so doing, he foregrounds the self-reflexive qualities of each painting. Otway’s work is about the moment of painting itself and questions the speed, quality and structure of these transmutations: the smooth passage of material into shape and discernible characters. Otway is subsumed into each closed system—the paintings hold onto and enclose an array of objects, either subjugated or shown.

Olivia Fletcher, 2019 for the show LEONARD at Peter von Kant

There seems to be nothing except primordial chaos outside my window. Utterly still, utterly alone, I watch darkness flower into transient symbols.1

Nicholas William Johnson’s paintings, a heady mixture of pigment and marble dust, appear tactile with several layers of canvas pasted and attached to each other. These paintings take Brugmansia (or, The Angel’s Trumpet — an exotic, hallucinogenic plant cultivated primarily in parts of South America) as their centrepiece because of this plant’s long history with altered behaviour, visionand reality. In these paintings, we watch on as the artist animates and controls light, dark and colour, elements of sight — placing things on top of and behind each other to create a sense of an elevated state — harking on the late mannerist tradition of pure colour, only adulterated through gradation. Obviously, Brugmansia do not naturally occur like this; you will not find these leaves on the floor of any lush jungle unless intoxicated or asleep.

The shape of the flowers’ dangling heads, their solarised fruits and leaves, are indebted to the influential ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes who wrote heavily on the various properties andeffects of Brugmansia. It was by way of these conversations that Schultes collated the rich information and charted the written history of what he called Plants of the Gods, which prominently featured the hallucinogenic strain of Brugmansia. Schultes committed his work to the analysis of the world’s most potent shrubbery through sustained interactions with communities within and around the Amazonian rainforest — crushed leaves, petals and seeds of the plant are combined to make intoxicating beverages, or are smoked with tobacco to induce ‘a delirium that can last for days...’ In some cases, Brugmansia has been known to put its subject to sleep for several hours.

You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand; you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you’re lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing.2

In these paintings (except one: Sunspilt V), Johnson has arranged various cuttings of Brugmansia sanguinea, also known in parts of Peru as Huaca, Huacacha or ‘The Plant of the Tomb’ — so called because of its connection to the belief that, once ingested, this red-dipped petal can reveal treasures beyond a person’s grave. Here, Schultes uses ‘treasures’ to denote anything latent or potentially atavistic; he may be gesturing toward a blurry vision of gold, its location (like the dead person buried beneath the ground), or some other gift of realisation, treasure in the sense that the flower reveals previously unknown territory in the mind and elsewhere. In Peru, Jivaroan people consider this hallucinogenic plant to be an important catalyst in coming of age rites and rituals: Schultes recounts how a young boy and his father ‘make a pilgrimage to a sacred waterfall, bathing, fasting and drinking tobacco water’ hoping to summon the son’s arutam or, ‘the vision- producing soul that can allow him to communicate with ancestors.3

While under the influence of Brugmansia, the boy will adopt a type of shamanistic role, undergoing a slight personality change, in order to see differently and speak towards and of the past. Once the intoxicating effects are over, the young boy regains — what? — consciousness, perhaps. He will then attempt to recover these visions, the ‘external soul’, and the treasure presented during this inebriated state. Just like any memorable dream, the sleeper attempts to wake up and relay the particulars of their dream: this is a familiar, slightly tired tradition; a cliche of pillow-talk. More troubling, perhaps, is the supposition that what has been witnessed or uncovered here is proof of reality separate from perceived life; or, the idea that Brugmansia relieves the tension between life and death, stasis and progression.

Johnson’s paintings are more than mere illustrations of Schultes’ groundbreaking research; their arrangement comments on how this delicate plant conjures visions of late medieval and late mannerist scale, pigmentation and technique. Flower and leaf compete for space and coverage in Johnson’s exotic landscapes; cyan tinted backgrounds suggest day-time reverie while, in other paintings, an overflow of cobalt blue produces an artificial night. But what of the night? Each form is composed of three shades: light, dark and pigment. It’s possible to compare Brugmansia to other natural fluctuations, or what the writer Anna Kavan called ‘the tension’ between night and day: difference in accessibility, communication and visibility occur throughout. At night, under the influence of cosmic radiations quite different from those of the day, Kavan wrote, human affairs are apt to come to a crisis. Suppose this blue hue could plunge the viewer into unseeing, temporarily; it would ask them to remain perfectly still or, imagine this pigment possessed the initiative to direct attention towards specific qualities of behaviour, actions that closely resemble life. It’s true that Johnson’s light and dark shades produce contour; however, they also suggest certain restricted views and play on the idea of imperfect sight, amnesia, and hallucinations.

Through imperfect vision, these works hark on the idea of abstracting or elucidating on a purely visionary state. In 1907, the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint completed a set of twenty five paintings she called Primordial Chaos (these would later become part of a much larger, more famous, series called Paintings for the Temple) and within each of these works she used a language of opposition: night and day, supine and upright, light and dark, alive and dead. af Klint used a language in the sense that these symbols are taken from a closed system with internally agreed- upon rules that can be used to translate and decipher meaning from these signs. Blue and yellow hues, for instance, were used to signify male and female respectively. In one particular painting, Primordial Chaos, No.3, af Klint creates a spiralling yellow submerged in a pit of blue; a giddy line travels from bottom-left to top-right, neatly traversing the fat yellow rays that are neither behind or in front of the mesh-like blue. Having spent some time in her early life with botanical drawings, af Klint was certainly influenced by fertilization or similar moments of convergence; the spiritual, celestial realm was her other guide. We may detect a similar system of notation at work in Johnson’s depictions of Brugmansia as each canvas is evidence of the same object seen from a slightly altered state.

Leaves stand erect, anthropomorphized in Johnson’s Caterpillarage while Brugmansia —- these bellshaped, nightshade flowers — dangle from up high. Vegetation hides behind and sneaks up on this scene without indication of where it stemmed from. Johnson uses blue and yellow, echoing af Klint, to suggest multiple oppositions and tensions. Drawn to these apparently untethered forms, Johnson creates a chorus that descends on its viewer like light from the sun, or the chaos at the centre of af Klint’s yellow orb, outside Kavan’s window watching: darkness flower into transient symbols.

1  Anna Kavin, Sleep Has His House (London: Peter Owen, 1973), p.9.

2  Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row., 1985), p. 4.

3  R.E. Schultes, Plants of the Gods (Rochester, Vermont: Healing Arts Press, 1992), p. 143

Olivia Fletcher, 2018 for the show Plant Communication Network at Peter von Kant

Damien Meade’s paintings begin as mud, but live on as creatures of dirt. Minerals suspended in water are made compact—first by time, then the artist’s hand—and transform into something that Meade cannot, or at least does not want to name. Paint shifts onto linen panels like dried-up play doh curling at its edges, creating what looks like hair, pairs of lips or the surface of skin, perhaps. In an unusual twist of tradition, this clay will never see the inside of a furnace. Instead, it stays wet and, once he is through, will be crushed and churned into the shape of Meade’s next model. These faces are consumed by an assumed role—as though, each portrait is actually an actor’s headshot auditioning for a play called ‘High Art’—so much so, that they have become indifferent to the eye that is beholding them. Mark, though, there is nothing theatrical about mud—it sits, covers up, and cooks while basking in the sun. There is a push and pull, a child’s gentle yet commanding tug, at the artificiality of this performance being in opposition to but also dependent on the most natural medium imaginable: mud.

Muddy substances are domesticated in England only insofar as some people will in their viscous depths find treasure to drag home with them. Unlike ceramic spoons or bowls, Meade’s paintings are uncooked and you wouldn’t want nor expect to be cooking with them. His painted depictions of sinuous clay remind us of conventions in art and how they relate to the human body: you can look but please don’t touch. More than this, clay and oil are irrigated from earth and the texture of Meade’s work is telling of its composite parts—not usually seen indoors, let alone someone’s house. This is nature in a threatening guise as there is a lurky danger that these things

might spill over, make mess, and ruin cleanliness. Kept in a premature phase, these paintings of sculptures discuss ugliness as the writer Mark Cousins has tried to define it, by bringing the imperfect or the slightly confused to the fore. Like dirt, Meade’s sculptures are acceptable when kept at a distance; different from Walter de Maria’s earthiness, for example, because the paint holds its dirt under a layer of oil and refuses to release it into the atmosphere.

In a periodical study of London and its inhabitants, the Victorian journalist William Mayhew wrote about ‘Mudlarks’: people, often children, known for walking along the Thames searching for desirable objects lost at sea and hidden in the marshy ground. Mudlarks were antisocial figures who wore ‘tattered indescribable things’, rarely speaking as they sifted through the stinking beach. Similar to Meade’s rude friends, they were inattentive to the eyes that watched them. The mudlark kept his or her gaze to the floor and, because of a preoccupation with finding something, was known as a mysterious scavenger. That’s not to say that they were unobtrusive people. Mayhew wrote an extended narrative on the mudlark including one interview with ‘an Irish Lad of about thirteen years old’, as though a description of the typical everyday routine of a mudlark could provide some insight into this soggy lifestyle. Obsessed with looking down, the young mudlark isindustrious on a temporary concourse and will be periodically interrupted by the coming and going of tides, boats and drunken parents. Though not strictly outlawed, mudlarks were ‘generally good swimmers’, prepared to flee at any moment and on the literal edge of society: the shoreline. An unsightly lot, these loiterers were apparently ‘covered in vermin’ and barred from public houses and coffee shops. The mudlark dismissed the city by rejecting the eyes that were, as Mayhew’s writing affirms, watching on with curiosity. Leaving footprints as payment, the mudlark would uncover odd but valuable things including iron fragments, bits of rope and smoking pipes: a type of mining but for mislaid, forgotten things. We can imagine a mudlark walking across one of Meade’s linen panels: an ornate stain, a footprint, mud in the shape of a school matron’s bust.

Instead of searching for something material, Meade’s portraits explore what it is to falsify or attain stature through art. A painting by Damien Meade brings out the baseness of a much- thumbed piece of clay, producing the outline of a hand that gestures towards a body that is invariably jettisoned. Each one is made of dirt, matter out of place, and is dirty because of its visual fallibility rather than any substantial qualities. Weight compresses, moves and bends things— originally, soil—out of shape. Both a tablet and a footprint, the horizontal steps into the vertical apparition of a portrait. His paintings of clay portray a cuneiform script—asking to be read—about contact, mark-making, things congealing or being fired but also, crudeness.

The recycled material is a reminder of decomposition, a different type of shape shifting, beginnings and ends.

Fitting, then, to see these paintings in Deptford, a deep ford, where the banks of the river swallow up and moan against human feet and their activity.

The shore, like any passage, is both entrance and exit wing.

Olivia Fletcher, 2018 for Damien Meade’s show at Peter von Kant

‘Cracked Actor’ is a musical piece written by David Bowie, the fifth track of the 1973 ‘Aladdin Sane’ album, written and composed in 1972 – also the birthday of Jonny Niesche. With an oscillating constellation between detailed iridescent and colourful glam rock and politically engaged art rock, the latter with its focus upon rhythm, repetition, and the avant-garde, this piece describes the decline of an aged ex film star reduced to paying for sexual performances behind the scenes of Hollywood. It is a decadent portrait of drugs and sex with no limits: ‘smack,’ ‘crack,’ ‘give me your head’ (extract). In addition, ‘Aladdin Sane’ was inspired by the story of ‘Vile Bodies’ made by British writer Evelyn Waugh in 1930, which Bowie himself read in one of his crossings: ‘The book speaks of a London in the period immediately preceding an imposing imaginary war, and he explained that at the time, ‘people had a frivolous, decadent, and stupid attitude.’ And, suddenly, they found themselves involved in this terrible holocaust. They were all out sorts and kept thinking about champagne, parties and clothes. Somehow it seemed to me that]there were strong analogies with people’s behaviour nowadays.’

Here colour palettes and their range of colours and gradients are ideally developed and generally based on the composition of the shades of colour that characterise the cover of Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’ album. This is the extravagant and surprising proscenium that inspired Jonny Niesche and in turn, is offered to us.

Post-minimalist artist and idolater in equal measure, both in colour and material, he develops his practice between painting and sculpture through architectural, erotic, metaphysical, hedonistic and psychological associations. He ‘thinks of the surfaces we call skin, fabric, canvas, wall and screen, and how they positively model our culture, generating contacts, connectivity and communication,’ as Giuliana Bruno affirms in her text ‘Surface Encounters.’* Jonny Niesche explores the expanded field of painting and abstraction by creating associations borrowed from all kinds of past and present personal experiences and reformulating our understanding of the effects of light and colour on the human senses. Planes which are often shiny and reflective surfaces made using glitter, iridescent mirrors, fabrics and dyes, welded steel translucent structures and lightweight digitally printed voiles, reflect an external character that is received and decoded by the spectator. Subsequently, the spectator is transported into a perpetual state of transformation and dazzling vibration as the result of a personalised mix of colour, light, and kinetics that in unison permeate the exhibition space. To do this he relies on the concept of exchange and cross-disciplinarity, rather than the establishment of a dominant one, so that they freely move back and forth between surfaces, shapes, symbols, riffs, and narratives. The gradients thus become ‘glam’ and sensual aspects of our lives that eroticise the surface of the skin, forming imperceptible but similar emotional sunsets on it. The forms create a new custom language, varying the structure from work to work. And the adorned works, in their completeness, lie in the space and on the surfaces ready to be worshiped.

Domenico de Chirico, 2017 for the show Cracked actor at Peter von kant

‘BRISTOL’, Peter von Kant’s latest exhibition, brings together three very different artists. Though Martyn Cross, Brendan Lancaster and Andrew Mania are all based in the city none feel a part of its art scene despite finding it conducive to making and showing work. Each relate more to the position of an outsider, the position of being detached from, rather than at the centre of, the action. In fact, aside from the fact of their coming from and/or living in Bristol now, this condition of remove is Cross, Lancaster and Mania’s strongest point of connection.

Eccentric characters populate Cross’s works. They are represented only indirectly, however, through particular accoutrements – a bag, a hat, a walking stick. Cross wanders the city in the manner of a twentieth century flaneur looking for people, places, and items of the everyday. These he examines from the imagined perspective of a person from the future, teasing out their strangeness by subtracting the human whilst at the same time managing to infuse the absent figures with absolute warmth and respect. Plastic bags, ironed, painted and fashioned into objects, for example, have made intermittent appearances in Cross’s work for a while. At times these are formed into small rugs like magic carpets, at others, brightly painted items of clothing – a bright red cap. They are like items of lost property, estranged from the people to whom they once belonged. In one instance a set of red and white striped shopping bags hang awkwardly against the wall. This claustrophobic series, hung one inside another, are ironed stiff and so shrunken. On one is a painted head, the decapitation more than a nod to Caravaggio’s depiction of Holofernes’s beheading. Once bagged, the severance of head from body becomes darkly humorous – capitalised, you might say.

Lancaster’s oil paintings, are similarly emptied of bodies yet, as settings, abstracted into brushed lines and fields of colour, they constantly allude to the presence of a human. Lancaster’s points of departure are viewpoints of city streets, convoluted sight lines through window frames and muted, brooding domestic interiors. Not that you’d know it – his paintings are always so heavily distilled that a staircase becomes a diagonal line, a hill a complicated series of vertices forming a cage-like mound. The resulting compositions are awkward: colour tones that are too similar touch; compositions are lopsided; small works are over-crowded with a tangle of gestures. Brush marks are smeared and blurred; constant correction, wiping away, and over painting causes his palette to become muddied and impure. The sense of things being a little off lurks everywhere, in Lancaster’s paintings, below the surface. This is in part due to their unresolved, inconstant, hybridity which wavers between a simplicity characteristic of Vanessa Bell and a confusion of angles and forms beloved by Édouard Vuillard.

No such instability courts Andrew Mania’s drawn portraits on wood. His poppy effusions of care-free colour and pattern, on the surface at least, appear in diametric opposition to Lancaster’s slow, reflective and understated works. The simple handling of Mania’s portraits reflects the spontaneous impulsiveness of the youths they portray; idealised males are pictured expectant. They look moodily into the middle distance, gaze back at us alluringly or watch themselves admiringly in mirrors or phones. Fresh-faced and pink-lipped they exude an unmistakable air of overdone sensuality and sexuality. There’s a deliberate amateur naivety to all this; it smacks of the love-sick teenager obsessively archiving his latest crushes. But the innocence of this compulsion is countered and complicated in two ways. Sometimes Mania’s work makes explicit references to classic compositions drawn from art history – Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) or Henri Matisse’s Dance (1910), for example. At others he allows backgrounds of semi-geometric decorative pattern or sketched scrawls to encroach on the figures themselves – in one instance, blue and white diagonal pattern replacing hair. Though rooted in the contemporary moment, Mania’s choice of subject matter actually has its origins in a long tradition in art and criticism of admiration for the young male figure, from classical Greek statuary to Victorian aesthetes like Walter Pater.

So what do you make of an exhibition such as ‘BRISTOL’ that plucks the work of three artists whose works are stylistically so dissimilar, whose thematic interests only just overlap, whose interests in classical cannon’s of Art History becomes apparent only after a time but whose works nevertheless hang here together, side by side? The lack of visual kinship in ‘BRISTOL’ is founded on difference as opposed to similarity (or is it homogeneity?). Its turn from internal coherence toward a celebration of variance is unusually restorative.

Lizzie Lloyd, 2017 for the show BRISTOL at Peter von Kant

Jack Otway (b.1991) is an artist of the obsessive kind, balancing an instinctive desire to create with a sensitive approach to paint as a tactile material. Otway spends months with his paintings, working and reworking them on slippery surfaces. After focusing on the monochrome as a space to explore precision and ideas surrounding ‘perfection’, the artist has recently turned towards a freer and more intuitive way of painting, inviting a new palette and narrative strands into his work.

With an emphasis on the Horror film genre, ‘Check in. Relax. Take a shower‘ presents a new, more personal body of work. Bright, over-saturated colours, organic forms and dynamic brushstrokes find their echo in the visual memory of the DIY attitude of low-budget horror films, which in their exaggeration place violence on a level of absurdity. While fluctuating between abstraction and figuration Otway’s paintings avoid clear depiction or representation and set the stage for an instinctive pictorial configuration.

Anneli Botz: Your show ‘Check in. Relax. Take a shower’ will display a completely new body of work. Where do you see a differentiation from your previous series?

Jack Otway: My old works were all painted in monochrome, but I felt like I was going in circles after a while. You can only go so far with a monochrome and a lot of the time I was just marginally editing colour choices and gestures. I think this was restricting me, especially in terms of composition. Those paintings were looking for some kind of beauty, something like the perfectly flat or the perfectly smooth, almost digital-print like, which is kind of futile, really. I mean you are always gonna get a brush mark or something and I was kind of denying myself the opportunity to use those things, those organic things. So I just decided to change and started making dirtier images. Not dirty in terms of colour, but dirty in terms of the way that they are layered. They’re not as ‘perfect’. The previous series was quite successful, so in that sense I feel like I’m taking more of a risk, I guess.

AB: Also with regards to content? Your current work has been strongly influenced by the imagery and context of the Italian thriller and horror film genre Giallo, as well as movies produced by Troma Entertainment. Both Troma and Giallo films focus on a drastic, almost absurd depiction of violence and horror. How did they find their way into your work?

JO: Violence and horror itself fascinate me. It fascinates me as a form of entertainment, in the physical performance and the way we are distanced from it through a screen or geographically. Similarly, actual violence interests me as much as it shocks me. We can be so aware of things happening around us and do absolutely nothing about it. And I am exactly the same. We are all passive in that respect. I suppose this could be more of an active attempt to understand this distancing.

AB: Like how?

JO: For example, I like the idea of a caricature of violence, of its substances. In a lot of the Troma films you have this sort of nuclear waste that’s active and vividly bright green. And you look at it and think “That probably wouldn’t do me any harm, it could be paint, water, washing up liquid or whatever“, and actually I don’t know what nuclear waste looks like. It plays with the terror and spectacle of these unknown (to most) alien substances and how they come into contact with the banal and everyday, from outside to within – interior and exterior substances. There are certain things that we are so distanced from that you think you know visually or materially, but that you do not know anything about on atactile level, really. Some of the props and some of the blood splatters in the Giallo and Troma films are extremely unrealistic – but that is exactly what makes them atmospheric and entertaining. They kind of keep them in the screen.

AB: As some kind of distancing or alienating effect towards the viewer.

JO: Exactly. The distance itself is quite important in my work anyway. Let’s say when going from a physical reality of a prop or a ketchup sauce, to on-screen as violence, which is then taken back into physicality within the painting that I am creating.

AB: In one of your statements you quote Sigmund Freud who explained that the use of dolls, or in your case props and substances, produces a confusion between the animate and the inanimate, the human and the inhuman. Is it this kind of confusion you were referring to?

JO: In the way my paintings work it does not really create confusion, but it is certainly toying with that idea. A lot of the forms within the paintings are very bowel-like, intestinal, but then they are also never specifically that. And the way that they are painted is very important – it highlights paint as
a gooey material. As much as it is about the painting, it is about the thing and the way it is rendered – an oscillation between the material and the image.

AB: What role does colour play here?

JO: The reds are very important as they are not blue vein-like kinds of reds, they don’t really resemble blood, they are very orange, they clash. There is a painting that I called ‘(S)platter’, it is the first one of this series. And it became a close-up of a lady, holding lots of bowels or innards. The title is really key first because of the obvious reference to splatter movies, but more importantly because of the word platter and the idea of serving something up – a feast, a spectacle. Serving this kind of edible indistinctness between the inside and the outside, the organ and the person that is gonna eat it. I think that’s how the lumpy still life compositions started to worm their way into the paintings.

AB: That is gross.

JO: Yes, it’s really gross. I’m not a violent person, so for me it is kind of exciting to be able to get that out in a caricatural, funny way. It entertains me.

AB: How would you describe your paintings to someone that is not looking at them physically, but only on-screen?

JO: Distanced from the work? They are very densely made. I use synthetic pigments, really bright orangey reds, but there are no real earthy tones. It’s strange as I feel it is a very organic and bodily way of painting, but all the colours are synthetic, applied in a really cosmetic fashion – the paint sits like plastic because of the amount of Liquin I use and how non-absorbent the surface is. It is lots and lots of thin, semi-transparent layers on top of each other and they have these veiny kind of bits coming through. Almost like a sinewy skin but still very, very shiny. In that respect they are pretty ugly and you don’t get that feeling of the stripped-back, raw canvas. They are getting more and more bodily, is how I feel.

AB: Would you agree that you are currently moving away from abstraction towards a rather figurative way of painting?

JO: I would say I am exploring figuration but I am wary of representation.

AB: What bothers you about representation?

JO: I don’t like the idea of pre-determination as it restricts what a form, space or gesture can become. It’s the strategies and decisions along the way that start to mould the parts into a more coherent whole or image and that way the paintings feel more immediate. I think socially or politically pre-determination of right/left or right/wrong, for example, is equally problematic and restrictive – it’s all relative and nuanced, you know. So I try to go into painting, not having any kind of idea of what I want it to look like but an idea of feel or atmosphere. I know what kind of processes I want to go through and obviously there are things that I’ve seen or read in my mind that are influencing me, but there are so many edits, modifications and wiping it all out along the way. So I don’t do any drawings on paper before. I do not do any sketches or any free planning, which is why some of the shapes are so awkward. Because they just kind of come out, arise. I just try to paint as freely as possible and the edits are not to get to a set goal, but to make decisions based on what is happening on the surface right then and there. Like a stage for improvisation.

AB: The title of the exhibition at Peter von Kant Gallery is ‘Check in. Relax. Take a shower.‘ What does this tell us about your work?

JO: It is paraphrased from the tagline of the remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Gus Van Sant took a classic and made it underwhelmingly shit. I’m toying with this distancing or remaking in time. So I felt this was worth stealing. Apart from that, Peter von Kant’s space is a domestic space too throughout the year,
so when visiting it you are basically coming into someone’s home, a secure and familiar place. It’s all tongue in cheek – in this instance you are entering with a false sense of security and you’re gonna see some paintings that aren’t comfortable – they’re agitated, cack-handed and physical. These paintings will certainly be a surprise to anyone who knows my previous practice. I’m luring people in “Come in. Relax. Take a shower”. It is a bit perverted, if you will. (laughs)

Interview by Anneli Botz, 2017 for the show Check in. Relax. Take a shower at Peter von Kant

‘For a painting is constructed like a house: each layer of colour applied, no matter how small, must be a force in support of the entire painted organism. The close scrutiny of every colour employed in a painting is part of the gymnastics and discipline of the spectator’s re-creative imagination.’ Otto Freundlich, 1931

Is it possible that you have stumbled upon an intimate survey of German abstractionist Otto Freundlich in South London? Are these the constructed compositions he made in the shadow of the second World War?

Moving closer to inspect the surface of these pictures the situation reveals itself to be more complex. We find ourselves in the midst of a near-forensic investigation by Alex Lawler, one that gives form to a myriad of relationships and systems that are hidden in plain sight. Lawler has not only adopted a methodical approach to analyse and re-create Freundlich’s paintings as collages but in developing and exhibiting this body of work he explores the value systems and networks at play within the culture of contemporary art. Freundlich’s paintings speak of early modernism’s optimism toward the role of art in society, while the iconic works left unfinished when he was killed in a concentration camp in Lublin, Poland in 1943 are heavy with the weight of history. Lawler re-imagines these dynamic and historically loaded paintings in a way that prompts us to reflect upon interconnected narratives, both past and present.

In place of paint, Lawler has extracted shards of colour from artworks reproduced in the pages of the art world’s most iconic trade magazine, Artforum. As he explains, ‘Artforum is so famously about promotion and power dynamics, between galleries, collectors, critics and artists ... but also on a formal level, it is a vast palette; eventually, every colour tone, every gradation, every mood from one colour to the next will appear in Artforum’. Volumes of print advertisements are sampled and abstracted from their original context, relinquishing their intended role of announcing, promoting and positioning an artist’s work within a market where currency is both intellectual and financial. They instead form components of a whole which balances aesthetic harmony with a critical, self-reflexive purpose.

If the viewer of contemporary art today increasingly plays a game of ‘spotting’ instead of looking – a game enacted as much at an art fair as by flicking through the pages of a magazine – then Lawler’s work can be seen as a playful disruption of this process. As viewers we are prompted to stop and ask: whose work are we looking for? The identity of the individual artist, as deciphered from the signifiers within their work, fragments and interconnects with a collective whole. Just as Freundlich described his paintings as forming a ‘community of colour’, Lawler’s work draws our attention to networks and forms of representation the artist must negotiate and find a place within.

Is it possible to consider these pictures in isolation from Freundlich’s legacy as an artist and a historic figure? As a painter, sculptor, writer and activist responding to the turmoil of the early 20th century, Freundlich has been likened to his contemporaries, Kandinsky and Mondrian.He was a member of both the German post-revolutionary Novembergruppe in 1919, and later Abstraction–Création in the early 1930s. Inspired by compositions in stained glass, he developed a visual language that combined geometric elements and chromatic variations, filling his paintings with flat colours that he ordered with straight lines and curves. His compositions saw aesthetic tensions and power dynamics unfold across each canvas. Yona Fisher writes, ‘Freundlich refers
to the inner necessity of the abstract art as the only right reaction to a world whose value system has changed. The artist, as an active witness of the moral and social crisis of his time, raises the question of art’s function’.

Like Freundlich, Lawler‘s pictures are primed by a rigid, mathematical system. Ratios are calculated to play with the scale of the original works, while angles and colours carefully matched. The internal logic and the system of reproduction itself becomes a driving force, as Lawler observes: ‘Eventually you have to let the system run, and, in the end, the system will dictate’. Lawler is in constant negotiation with the parameters he has put in place, and the act of disruption is an alluring one to him. Subtle acts of sabotage reveal themselves in his own brush strokes that mingle among the collage, supporting the overall structure.

There is a sense of energy and movement in search of balance within these works, though Lawler’s queries extend beyond the frame. By drawing our attention to layered and interconnected relationships – between contemporary art and art history, the artist and the gallery, the work of art and the market – Lawler acts in a way as a journalist, uncovering and presenting to us the continually evolving story of art within the frame of politics, power dynamics and aesthetic relations.

Elizabeth Stanton, 2016 for the show After Freundlich at Peter von Kant

Anna-Lena Werner: Do you look at your paintings as one work-in-process or as individual series?

Tobias Buckel: They are a work-in-process. Some themes or motifs do recur and I like seeing works from different times set in relation to each other.

ALW: One of these themes is the geometric and graphical form. What kind of space do they suggest in your paintings?

TB: They describe a transitional space that is rooted somewhere between figuration and abstraction. I often have an idea of something figurative when I start with a new painting. This can be a picture, a certain shape or even a concept or a word that I am interested in. During the working process I try to get rid of these cognitive thoughts and ideas.

ALW: Can you make an example of a picture or a word that has been relevant for you?

TB: There are many paintings that derive from pictures of interior spaces and stage settings, and others that started with the words “panel” or “display”.

ALW: Why is it necessary to get rid of them?

TB: As long as I have concrete ideas in my mind, the paintings are just illustrations of my thoughts. It gets interesting, when I give up control and let things happen that couldn’t have thought of before. I am more interested in the abstract qualities of a painting than in narrative structures.

ALW: One of the abstract qualities in your paintings are the colours, which range from heavy dark browns to bright pastel pink tones. How do you pick them?

TB: My use of colour has become pretty much intuitive and the tones often stay within a scheme that reflects my personal taste at a time. The new ones have a lot of blue and grey tones – they appear more graphical.

ALW: Your application of paint is extremely thin, often even revealing several previous layers. Why do you choose to make the history of the work visible?

TB: This is my pondering working process. I start something with a few brushstrokes, then add some decisions, wash them off or paint them over again. I often let canvases rest for some days or even weeks before I go on.

ALW: Do you choose the materials intentionally or instinctively?

TB: I mix different materials intentionally, but the range of mediums is carefully selected. For example, after using oil and turpentine for a while, I experimented with using water-based paint that worked even better for a thin and washy application. In some new works I tested mixing paint using pigments, glue and acrylic binder, which is somewhere between acrylics and gouache, and I can still wash it off with a lot of water.

ALW: Not only spaces, also depths play a major role in your paintings. What made you choose the medium of paint and not, say, sculpture?

TB: Painting feels most natural to me. With a pencil or a brush I am able to formulate what I want to say. I tried other media during my studies, like video or sculpture, but I didn’t want to deal with the third or fourth dimension. Paintings have a virtual quality that fascinates me. Although it is flat, you can create the illusion of space or experience something that is not really there.

ALW: You play with light and shadow – perhaps one of the few traditional and figurative elements left in your paintings. If you think about painterly traditions, who inspired you in the beginning of your career?

TB: I used to be excited about really painterly stuff – abstract expressionism and some CoBrA artists like Asger Jorn. But in retrospect, I think that Sigmar Polke was most influential. I was around eighteen at that time – quite a while before I studied art. I come back to his work from time to time. There is still something about it that I don’t understand.

ALW: Both Polke and the CoBrA artists used a sense of playfulness in their art – has that aspect also grown on you?

TB: Yes, maybe. I wanted to work with a variation and add the lightness that I reach in my paper works also to some of my paintings.

Interview by Anna Lena Werner, 2015 for Tobias Buckel’s show at Peter von Kant