Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Torsten Slama at Kimmerich

Torsten Slama at Kimmerich

They’re surrealist tropes done in pencil. But derive oddity less from the mystical and aggressively surreal and more from the direct and flat footed depiction of objects. The only finesse is with a little brush of detail not suited to contemporaneity. Their representation is stranger, like early Vija Celmins with a Miyazaki eye for detail, or yet Konrad Klapheck, yet more opaque in their subject. The miracle of watching Miyazaki’s animators make representational sense of something complicated and visually magic. The PR tries to explain away the engines attempting attachment of political connotation, but rightly does a poor job, and the engine blocks block the picture in something heavy. Though the pictures are sexual, the same as a horse.
Seeing things like this you wonder why there isn’t more like it. Art seems to have trouble inventing anything besides new methods for large scale abstraction.