In ‘_We’ll slide down the surface of things…_’ De Vleeshal presented work by three painters who explore the increasing artificiality of reality: Frank Bauer, Glen Rubsamen en Arnout Killian.
Photo(s): Leo van Kampen
The world around us is becoming increasingly artificial: the concepts of ‘spectacle’ and ‘experience’ overtaking those of authenticity and reality. Artificiality is manifest in our physical surroundings, but also in our inner worlds. Our taste, our emotions, and so even our identities are coloured by the flood of images evoked by the mass media. To male super model Victor Ward, the main character in Bret Easton Ellis’ novel Glamorama (1998), a situation or emotion can only be real if it reminds him of an image from a magazine, a music video or a movie. Quasi philosophically, he quotes U2: ‘_We’ll slide down the surface of things…_’.
This increasing artificiality is generally condoned, as it is believed to result in dangerous loss of meaning. Because of this, hardly any insights have been developed in how to deal with artificial reality. But perhaps (figurative) painting has a part to play. Painting has had, after all, a long tradition of intensifying reality. Each of the three artists featured in ‘_We’ll slide down the surface of things…_’ investigates the artificial reality in which we live.
Frank Bauer
Frank Bauer (1964, lives and works in Düsseldorf) is a painter and a DJ. With a light undertone of melancholia, he portrays his friends in clubs, at a party at someone’s house, or at the end of a long night. Bauer’s paintings are based on photographs of moments that at first glance seem uneventful. But by studying these moments as he paints them, Bauer subtly unveils previously unnoticed details in the interaction between those portrayed. At the same time, his paintings breathe a longing for glamour. He illustrates our desire – inspired by images from the mass media – to see moments in our lives from a distance, as images from a more beautiful, more stylish, better world.
Arnout Killian
Arnout Killian (1969, lives and works in Amsterdam) is part of a long painterly tradition of a fascination with light. Whereas the painters in this tradition mainly want to catch the natural light in for example landscapes and still lifes, Killian is interested in artificial light. He paints the hard light, full of contrast, of catwalks and window displays, and the cool blue light typical of images from the internet. His interest in artificial reality is also apparent in the beautiful as well as banal images he chooses to paint: an anonymous hotel room wanting to convey luxury and comfort; the carefully cultivated nature of a golf course; a woman whose identity is hidden by a beauty mask.
Glen Rubsamen
The paintings of Glen Rubsamen (1959, lives and works in New York) are deeply rooted in the tradition of landscape painting, yet at the same time they are very modern. He combines lyricism about the beauty of nature with the terrifying emptiness of a resting area along the highway. The romantic ideal of untouched nature has permanently evaporated. In Rubsamen’s paintings, nature according to travel brochures and Euro Disney has taken its place. Thus lampposts, for example, have become natural elements in dramatic compositions with palm trees. In these partly artificial landscapes beauty is not lost, it has become ambivalent.
Herman Verkerk
Under the name of his bureau Event Architecture, Herman Verkerk (1963, lives and works in Amsterdam) has created designs for, among others, the Dutch fashion label So by Alexander van Slobbe and several museums. For this exhibition with (and about) painting Verkerk has, in line with the theme of the exhibition, created a hypermodern museum space. The enormous contrast between this space, and the Gothic architecture of De Vleeshal creates its own artificial reality for ‘_We’ll slide down the surface of things…_’.
