The figures that populate the recent paintings of the U.S.-based German artist Thomas Eggerer are engaged in activities that painting freezes and renders ambiguous or illegible. “Painting” and “figure” are here in conflict. Abstract registers—stains, softly scumbled areas, rhetorically gestural flourishes—clash with an explicitly depictive figuration, based on found photographs but not photo-realistic. Within this dichotomy, each register is a sign for its idiom as well as an enactment of it.
Eggerer capitalizes on this clash of styles to express social alienation. The figures are young men in what we assume to be—judging from their lean, shirtless torsos and the cigarettes and beer cans they hold—a club, party or concert setting. Deriving from a small range of image fragments, they repeat in various sizes and degrees of definition across canvases ranging from roughly 4 to 6 feet in height. Over glowing monochrome grounds, the figures come in and out of focus, from the vaguest sketch to finely worked passages of chalky oil embellished with pedantic detail. Head or limbs are left as flashes of translucent color in conjunction with a finished torso that appears corpse-gray by contrast. Passages of virtuosic corporeal illusionism suggest quick, penetrating memories crystallized out of an eroded context.
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