oil on canvas, 140 x 200 cm
‘The TV programme is like a water tap:
it can be can turned on and then images pour out’, says Stefan Ettlinger
(born 1958) describing his raw material; ‘You can really find everything
there’. Following the principle of zapping, he grasps scenes and fragments out
of the pictorial stream of TV channels, videos, glossies, post cards and his
own photographs. Human beings, houses, street scenes, Märklin tramways are
assembled, tableau-like, into an enigmatic panorama. On the canvas, which is
set in a horizontal position when being painted, the thin egg tempera
homogenises what does not belong together: self-organising gestures devoid of
any will to an expressionistic style. Ettlinger’s pictures are composed of
conflicting props and splinters of a perceptual world distracted by the flood
of images and so depict visual order as a process, as something that always
comes into being anew, against the regulatory insinuations of the photographic
document. His painting reminds some of Edward Munch. The achieved effect could
perhaps be called Kafkaesque, less in the nightmarish existential sense than in
the dream-like combinations of receding and grotesque perspectives.
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