in »Tobias Buckel: Raumdilemma«, Snoeck 2020
„I am a believer in slowness, and I have no faith in the added value of spontaneity, more in intuition and that’s a big difference.“ [1]Per Kirkeby
SLOW PAINTING
Reflections on Tobias Buckel’s Painting
Tobias Buckel is a painter who criticizes images. He mistrusts the visual communication of the mass media, the images of which awaken longings that they cannot and probably do not want to fulfil. At the same time, he is suspicious of our present day life’s universal acceleration, which media theorist Paul Virilio described as early as 1990 with critical distance as a “raging standstill”: a technologically induced, insane acceleration of our civilization that would ultimately lead to its decline.[2] For Tobias Buckel, reflection upon which pictures a painter should create in this image-flooded and efficiency-oriented world is as central as the question of what distinguishes painting from other visual media and makes it the medium of his choice. He finds a solution in the explicit slowness of his painting. His paintings are always a plea for a protracted, processual working method and thus a counter-draft to the universal striving for speed and efficiency: “As I see it, painting resists fast consumption. It is a ‘slow’ medium that can open up spaces in our viewing habits. Even if important decisions are often made intuitively in the studio, they are made consciously – they are reflected upon and evaluated, they are not accidental. And the finished picture, in which all decisions coincide in a single moment, also demands subsequent time and attention from the viewer in order to classify and evaluate exactly what is depicted.”[3]
Tobias Buckel’s paintings grow organically, often waiting unfinished for months in his studio before he resumes his work and continues the search for motif, form and colour. In an open-ended process, the composition is reworked again and again, and the texture and motifs of the picture’s surface are changed. The traditional contrast between surface and depth is consistently undermined, as the final version of the painting allows a view of the sediments previously deposited on the canvas. An attentive observer will note the contemplation involved in the painting process, the new beginnings and considered variations of the paintings: a colour tone that emerges diffusely from the depth of the picture; graphic structures that slumber in the background as protagonists of the previous versions; faded architectural elements that play with spatial ideas without necessarily becoming three-dimensionally concrete; shadowy pictorial elements that have been washed off with solvents and now convey an aesthetic of the indefinite. All these elements are representative of the work’s processual genesis and demonstrate image-finding situated between reflection and intuition, hesitation and spontaneous action, cautious steps and drastic interventions. But even a drastic intervention, a supposedly spontaneous painterly gesture, may be in reality the result of complex and protracted thought processes.[4] Thus Tobias Buckel is never concerned with the visualization of certain facts or with any form of narration. Instead, the focus of his artistic interest is on form and its graphic impact, as well as the creation of metaphors and signs rich in associations. Reflection on the medium of painting is always inherent in these paintings, and the elementary questions of form and structure, colour and composition, spatiality and surface division are dealt with intelligently.
Numerous paintings show rooms and spatial structures as motifs. These are always staged spaces such as interiors as the setting for self-representation; displays or model-like theatre spaces; gardens as representative of domesticated and aestheticized nature; artificial landscapes with scenic architecture such as ensembles of grottos or ruins. The recurring motifs also include repetitive wall and floor structures, sometimes reminiscent of masonry, bricks, floor tiles, blinds, or wire mesh. This repetition of forms and the stringing together of the same graphic elements structure and rhythmize the picture surface. Many canvases also exhibit an emphasis on the horizontal or vertical centre of the image or a division of the canvas into two parts, in which above and below, right and left, are locked in conflict while attempting to assert themselves.
Tobias Buckel’s paintings are stagings of stagings, since the models after which the artist works already show staged places, constructed spaces, displays and landscapes. Ultimately, his painted spaces are not spaces, either. They possess no volume, and neither are they bound by the laws of perspective or gravity. Physical, mathematical and visual certainties do not apply, since they are constantly being disturbed and questioned. The final compositions are far more reminiscent of imagined spaces and landscapes; as in a dream or a nebulous memory, here there are no reliable parameters on which to base an explanation of the world. The strangely vague and inexplicable atmosphere is underlined by the specific use of paint and colour. The distemper colours, some of which the artist has mixed himself, sit dully on the canvas – matt, powdery, almost chalk-like. The painting medium is often mixed with white, resulting in a diffuse anti-colour. Since the paints are frequently used with great fluidity, colour gradients and puddles crystallize on the canvas and promote the works’ partly translucent, washed-out impression.
Ideally, the slow emergence of these works corresponds to a decelerated mode of reception. By focusing and contemplating, the viewer – in the process of understanding the artistic approach of slowness – is able to gain a deeper insight into the creation of the images. The conceptual slowness of the work’s genesis can be experienced, as physical and mental (life) time seems to be inscribed into the paintings. Perhaps the viewer may even see the continuing innovative capacity of painting confirmed, its opposition to an omnipresent pictorial industry producing interpretatively unambiguous visual information and repeatedly offering the recipient what is already familiar. Painting, on the other hand, can create allusive visual metaphors which are more in keeping with our complex world. It is not a one-dimensional model for explaining the world, but leaves gaps that can open up space for association and fields of reference to the observer. Belgian painter Luc Tuymans described this openness in an interview in 2001: “A good picture is characterized by the fact that the viewer always adds something to it. There is no point to one that has been fully formulated already. That’s why it is decisive that we, as painters, take a step back and stop at some point; well, at the exact point where something still needs to be expressed. […] Because it’s right there that the viewer will question the image.”[5] In fact, it is often not the visual feel-good zones but the interpretatively open, brittle and unwieldy works that become fixed in the viewer’s mind and reverberate: the pictures which are initially incomprehensible, which pose riddles and contradict our familiar handling of images. Tobias Buckel’s paintings and drawings are also open, ambiguous pictorial metaphors. They remain in a fragile state of suspension, balanced between figuration and abstraction, description and coincidence, perfect and apparently unfinished. These supposed opposites are not played off against each other, but permitted to assert themselves side by side.
Harriet Zilch
[1] Per Kirkeby. Ein Gespräch von Heinz-Norbert Jocks, in: Kunstforum International, vol. 135, 1996, p. 260 ff.
[2] Cf. Paul Virilio, Rasender Stillstand, Munich 1992.
[3] Tobias Buckel. Über meine Malerei, unpublished Portfolio, no pag.
[4] In 1980, art historian Rosalind Krauss, in her essay The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, uncovered the painterly gesture as a modernist myth. She demonstrated how the “spontaneous” brushstroke with which Impressionist Claude Monet reproduced external impressions of nature was based on a complex system, founded on seriality and repetition.
[5] Luc Tuymans. Ein Gespräch von Heinz-Norbert Jocks. in: Kunstforum International, vol. 156, 2001, p. 340 ff.