"Andreas Dobler"
Tema celeste, Milano, luglio - agosto 2003, p. 91
Working with contrasts and opposites. This is the aim of Swiss artist Andreas
Dobler. These contrasts and contradictions - the lightness of a material like
paper juxtaposed with the heaviness of black ink and with what is being represented
- are so evident and exaggerated that, standing before his works, the viewers
experience a feeling of displacement, almost as though they were looking at
the fanciful workings of a schizophrenic mind. Portraits of anonymous women
taken from porn magazines, whose faces are skillfully hidden, coexist with stylized
lunar surfaces; vistas and backgrounds clearly reminiscent of psychedelia are
juxtaposed with the exteriors of dream hotels, fantastical touristy architecture,
in which time seems to have ceased; reproductions of sculptures that bring to
mind Henry Moore - the only figurative element, even stripped of every detail
- become sadomasochism/bondage emblems with the introduction of chains and the
sinister interiors of a hypothetical prison. Fabric, paper, canvas, wood, preparatory
sketches, photocopies, sculptures, ink, acrylic, disparate formats that tend
prevalently toward the macro make any kind of rigid categorization almost impossible.
The artist has said he creates drawings because it "is an economic way
to put down in large format" his ideas. His influences are manifold: science
fiction illustrations, pop culture (from the mall to extraterrestrials), a passion
for music (which Dobler listens to while painting, ranging from Brian Enu for
a meditative dimension to electronica and house for a more aggressive, tension-filled
atmosphere), horror films, and a comic-strip aesthetic all make Dobler an impalpable
artist. Instead of the evolving pictorial means and the formal variants that
characterized his work in the '80s, the artist prefers to explore the consumer
society in all of its contradictions, presenting scenes both extraordinary and
of marginal ordinariness, by means of a pictorial matrix, broadly speaking,
in which images coming from a lung daydream seem to prevail. Dobler, moreover,
seems to love linear perspective, knowingly constructed, by means of which,
with geometric tricks and artifice and juxtapositions of color at the boundaries
of bad taste, he attracts viewers, making them feel part of his parallel universe
as if by magic.
Daniele Perra