The three boys in Thomas Eggerer’s Stranded (2021) appear as one, stretched in stilled motion across the canvas. This confusion of bodies reads like a sequence of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs, especially Two Men Wrestling (1887), except in Eggerer’s painting the bodies are not distributed in a gridded sequence, they are arrayed in the painting’s vertiginous depths. Do the shoes hanging below the platform belong to the same body? Is the figure to the right the reflection of the similarly blue-shirted youth in the centre? The observable and rational response in both cases is no, but the painting conjurers its own contradictory dream logic that insists the answer is not so simple. Eggerer’s spaces unsettle. Standing before the painting, you look down on the scaffolding the boys sit on, which is painted in a transfixingly wonky perspective so that, within the space of the picture, you must also gaze up at the entire composition. A closer inspection reveals the boys are untouching yet proximate, as if desiring connection, intimacy and collective action or protest (the flags, the silent megaphone). If the ambiguous flags recall propaganda, it is propaganda that, no matter its purpose, is already crowded by consumer goods and, as Eggerer hints, corporate co-option. (At least four, maybe six, brands are legible in the painting.)
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