Untitled
Künstler/in
Nick Oberthaler
(geb. 1981 in Bad Ischl, Oberösterreich)
Date2019
ClassificationsMalerei
MediumAcryl auf Leinwand
Dimensions120 × 85 × 3,2 cm
Credit LineArtothek des Bundes
Object number28395
DescriptionSOME NOTES ABOUT M_O_B“Mobile” is the name of an important book written in 1962 by Michel Butor, a major writer of the Nouveau Roman, which breaks the rules of the romantic novel. “Mobile” maps the United States of America though a car journey. Collecting elements of American culture: flyers from hotels, diners, and bird names, Butor assigns each state by the brandnames of its gas stations: Mobile, Exxon, Shell… and through this constant movement across invisible borders, fake lines on an invented map, Butor reinvents a story of migration. In constant movement, like a concrete poem using natural facts as events, “Mobile” creates a new geography of mundane life. It also deals with old stories, the Salem witch trials, sundown towns, the reverse of the ideal postcard.
What could a contemporary landscape look like? What form does the postcard take today? Instant visions through iPhones, Macbooks, iPads, the new birdsongs are Tweets, Google colors supply our daily palette….
By drawing an oblique line on his canvases, Nick Oberthaler twists the orthogonal structure. While the axis of the world is shifting, the one on the canvas is moving. Under the colorful pattern, there is a construction. This is an operational structure, in movement. It reflects the structure of the world, of our world, of a dysfunctional Europe looking for direction. The squares create a chessboard, cut in half into a triangle. Two triangles make a square. A square is a specific kind of rectangle. Like in Flatland, geometric shapes can be metaphors for human conditions. Strident colors, acid lemon, metallic blue, rusty orange, intercut by shiny grey: this is a computer palette applied to canvas. The ensemble makes a stage set, installed on an expanded open grid, which creates its own structure inside the superstructure of the gallery, an open work. Polysemic and polymeric, the work is like a polysphere which can be seen as a group of different moments, fractions of time, as painting is time made into image. This is possible only by moving around in between the pictures, at the pace of bodies. Each painting is a fragment of a whole, and the Movement of Bodies creates a response to the Movement of Borders, we feel it as a question of vision, decision, and taking a stand, choosing your position, here and now. One dice won’t change the randomness of the order, but if we are two, a pair of dice, we can create a new map. As one is foul, two is humanity, we can choose the diagonal and shake the chessboard, move across the borders.
The strangeness of tones, according to Neo-mannerism, reveals the revolutionary capacity of colors, of paint as a joyful flag in the wind. The paint is a “macula”, a spot, as well as the make up. The brush touch gives breath to the flatness and shows how instability can be a vibrant quality.
Text: Galerie Layr
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