Art in a Complex System: The Paintings of Matthias Groebel

Matthias Groebel, http://groebel.eyewithwings.net/. Represented by Universal Concepts Unlimited, New York. http://www.u-c-u.com.

Matthias Groebel's body of work has been made for reading through its process as much as from the paintings themselves. In this sense his work is very much of its time. Groebel, who lives and works in Cologne, Germany, sets up tensions that are a function of the seemingly oppositional techniques used in making the work; and along with many of his contemporaries, complex interplay between image and concept sets up paradoxes within the pieces. On another level, the work very definitely deals with areas that are being largely neglected in the visual arts currently. He is quite interested in aspects of art history, and his work is anything but anti-intellectual. He is not interested in "one-liners" and as a practising scientist as well as a painter, he wants to approach his work as an experiment with hypothesis, method, result, and conclusion. This makes for a welcome depth of engagement and debate for the audience.

The tension created in Groebel's work is one of its most significant features. The viewer is initially drawn into what at first glance is an image/text piece. A playful invitation to search for the various canons typically present in that kind of work is presented, with questions being raised around whether the pieces are an inter-referential view of the art world, a political statement, a comment on consumerism, or an examination of the globalization of the media. These are just a few examples of extensively covered debates and points in this type of work and aspects implicitly present in these pieces. But Groebel's work demands a poetic response as well as a conceptual one.

Although Groebel's work is made up of stills grabbed from a screen, and the painting process is machine driven, it is heavily interwoven with the textural and gestural nature of painting. The works function in relation to their existence as art objects with an author as much as to the techniques used and pluralistic subject matter and concepts present in the pieces. Groebel appropriates much of the language of performance, cultural activism, and ephemeral arts and yet is quite openly making objects for consumption by the art market, and perhaps, more importantly, to be positioned within the conventions of art history.

Groebel began engaging with new media in 1988 and since 1990 has worked producing painting with the aid of computer imagery. In contrast to a number of his colleagues, it has been painting rather than the computer that has been the central basis of his work. Its roots lie in a study of Renaissance workshop traditions and of the use of scientific method to aid painting. Vermeer's use of camera obscura to aid clarity and scale in his paintings is relevant to Groebel's work. Until recently, art historians (vide Philip Steadman's Vermeer's Camera) were reluctant to acknowledge Vermeer's potential tools, partly through lack of evidence but perhaps, also because it does not fit the Enlightenment model of a painter or author. By using a machine, incorporating the much maligned airbrush at that, and image transfer Groebel completely transgresses the rules of painting even in today's climate.

Computer aided packages have challenged perceptions of the image, texture, and truth in painting, photography, and moving pictures over the last ten years. Groebel is one of a growing number of artists whose work deals directly with this. His work derives from another point in history when the nature of representation was being radically re-evaluated. Using the Renaissance workshop model in the sense that the work exists as an idea within the artist, which is then transferred to painting, Groebel adopts a similar approach using contemporary tools. He prefers not to work with a studio of...