21 Feb 2009

Underclass Atavism at Galleria Gentili

Underclass Atavism

Hansjörg Dobliar, Matthias Dornfeld, Thomas Helbig, Ralf Ziervogel

A strange image of the contemporary art scene is developed by three painters and a graphic artist from Berlin in their pictures, drawings and sculptures. The pictures, which are partially painted using sharp colours and partially with dull colours and which are half representational and half abstract, seem to open a cyberspace in which the formulas of the avant-garde are able to find a new home. Because, in contrast with the modern trend, their pictorial language does not produce an attitude but rather a virtual area, in which the geometric forms, gestures, figurations and existences can live. Outwardly, the pictures, sculptures and objects behave rather conventionally. But internally they are laced with an almost archaic poetry full of atrocity, exoticism or laughter. The world of play and colourful gaiety transforms imperceptibly into a hybrid prevailing mood in which the world of shadows of neuronal fantasies forms the matrix.

Paintings, sculptures, collages and drawings seem to participate in the eclecticism of postmodernism by moving stylistically in the tracks of various avant-garde traditions. In truth they are psychograms whose atavistic tendencies shine out from behind the convention.

Hansjörg Dobliar (born 1970) develops prismatic and abstract formations of unusual and often psychopathic colourfulness, which stick like viruses to people and their reality in his collages.

Matthias Dornfeld (born 1960) makes delicate coloured cocoons, in which fragile architectures or faces light up, archetypes from the world of the unconscious.

Thomas Helbig (born 1967) allows only fragments of a pictorial cosmos to come to the surface of his quasi-informal works. They contain mysterious messages from Freud's Urozean.

Ralf Ziervogel (born 1975) shows Artaudian atrocity in the labyrinth of his drawings. The grotesque world of his pictorial inventions embraces comic strips, caricature and the history of art in a monstrous Theatrum Mundi.

Veit Loers