Andreas Dobler

 
"Andreas Dobler"
Flash Art, Milano, May-June 2003, p. 155

Visiting Andreas Dobler’s exhibition at Le Magasin is like wandering through reconstruction of the annual exhibition of the menta asylum which opens J. G. Ballard’s novel, The Atrocity Exhibition: bizarre images, a mixture of Freud and Luna Park, familiar representations and codes of insoluble dreams. Depicting certain nonsexual roots of sexuality, Torso (1999) depicts an Arp-like sculpture with an accentuated anthropomorphism placed inside a hotel room, thus rendering modernist sculpture’s latent eroticism explicit. Splurt (2002) and other pictures mix modernist archetypes with intensely psychedelic backgrounds or match references to literature, such as Sheep Pieces on Electric Meadow (1999), simultaneously invoking, Henry Moore and Philip K. Dick. The painting on the condescending effects of displacement which now belong to the tradition of kitsch. Dobler’s interest in marginal cultural expressions such as sci-fi and fantasy illsutration shows not so much apropriation as the pursuit of an adolescent dream. Rather than a flight outside culture, it is an involution within, into its obscure recesses, like psychedelicism – an art form which in itself is a reinterpretation of Op art and Surrealism.
Through its narrative dimension, his painting retains the remembrance of an illustrative function. Landscapes, architecture, or interiors are stripped of the human presence, like so many scenic elements or surfaces of projection; his more recent paintings seem to adopt the setting of a ghost train, like The Demon of Painting (2001), a sort of self-portrait of the painter as Marilyn Manson, and giving credit less to the idea of a resurrection of painting but rather to an ambivalent affirmation of its perpetuation post-mortem – a living dead painting.

Vincent Pécoil