People, Tobias Spichtig’s third exhibition at Jan Kaps, presents a new cast of his portrait series. Since his earliest works, he has developed an identity for his paintings that runs like a common thread through the works: although the works are individual at their core, they are clearly recognizable and come together to form a whole. The moods in his paintings and his distinct painterly style are reminiscent of various eras of gestural painting, in particular the Expressionism of the early 20th century, but also of artists such as Jean Dubuffet or Martin Disler, historical models with whom he cultivates visual and conceptual affinities. In his ongoing series of portraits, Tobias Spichtig brings together people who are close and dear to him: artists, writers, actors, musicians, etc. His gaze is comparable to the teenage awe of a fanboy, except that his cast of characters is tangible, they are more than just a fantasy. There is a shared time and history with these People.
The main impact of Tobias Spichtig’s painting lies above all in the intensity of his use of color, and for People the artist has doubled up on violet and yellow, all kinds of red. The different painted sections and surfaces pulsate, suggest and radiate light, there is a kind of Hoffmanian push and pull in these compositions, and it is these colors that are the main source of luminosity, although it is not entirely clear whether it is the surroundings that illuminate the faces, or whether the faces are so radiant that everything around them begins to glow like a halo. Isn’t that the basic function of every portrait — to shed light on something? But more on that later.
Every head, every face extends to its immediate surroundings. Tobias Spichtig completely disregards the concept of boundaries: the all-encompassing composition is everything, the surrounding shapes are as much a part of the faces as the rest of the paintings. None of the environments serve as a singular feature or demarcation, nor is the artist interested in distinguishing individual strokes, drips or gestures from one another. Rather, it is the disorder in which everything comes together that makes his raw subjects so lively. There is something deeply muscular about these compositions.
Similar to experiencing a song, a stage performance or a runway show, the details, the individual elements or even the words sometimes become secondary, what counts is the experience of the whole. Lights, sounds and so on. What sticks in the mind, evokes conviction and endurance, and what comes afterwards, standing ovations and empty seats, is the experience of the single image like a drop that actually becomes the whole show, concert or event. The question of how different cultural disciplines have cross-fertilized each other and whether one inspired the other first seems to have become redundant. It is much more interesting to recognize how much an art form reveals and how much it conceals in order to maintain the balance between what you feel and what you see — and yes, painting has always danced this balancing act with an off-beat or two.
On the one hand, painting exposes, invites discourse and ideally opens up a world of interpretation — but at the same time painting takes something apart, disembodies, reduces or cuts something off, abstracts; because every picture remains a fragment, a detail: a head without a body. These endless bodies and body parts form a chimera of different bits of history that come together to form a lump of the contemporary: Painting, image or object, for Tobias Spichtig his formal language is a deep communication with it all of the above: subject, introspection and process, material and gesture as much as what comes before and after the image, time and space surrounding his practice and connecting it to actual People, keeping in mind the potential collapse of distance between concepts and ideas, the medium and its object, the viewer and the seen, cultural activity to the bone, born of the heartbreaking and ever-changing questions of collaboration, complicity and community.
And as such, these People are an extension of the artist, and there is a little of him in every portrait. Just as there is beauty everywhere, something sacred, the multiplicity of being, deeply linked. Paintings are also known to hold secrets. Some of them are so precious that they must be shared. The contrast between the private and the public is not necessarily a contradiction, but arguably the essence of the artistic dialog itself; it is the sometimes beautifully uncomfortable exchange that Tobias Spichtig calls the embarrassment of painting.
In the past, Tobias Spichtig has used sunglasses in his paintings. Some say that putting on shades is one of the most public ways to hide, and if that is true, the self must be revealed somewhere between the crystalline color of the eyes and their shimmering reflection. Or forgotten, perhaps that is why Tobias Spichtig keeps returning to Brâncuși’s Sleeping Muse, the decapitated, sideways sculpture lying there with its eyes closed. Something must remain hidden. In his other portraits, the eyes act as an anchor for his own ideal of beauty, for something that really existed: a spirit free of judgment and perhaps free of morality. For what these eyes see is always just a fact, like the recording of a surveillance camera. It is the interpretation of these facts that raises questions of value, or even of a weapon like taste.
The logic of such ancient beauty is not only transformative, but also a logic of disavowal. And for Tobias Spichtig, disavowal is a forward motion, an upward flight. Beauty, on the other hand, is both the goal and the source, and perhaps the ugly lies in between.
Tobias Spichtig
born 1982 in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Tobias Spichtig’s works have been exhibited internationally at Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Swiss Institute, New York; Boros Foundation, Berghain, Berlin; Kaleidoscope, Spazio Maiocchi, Milan; Centre d’art contemporain – la Synagogue de Delme, Delme; SALTS, Basel; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Dortmunder Kunstverein; Malta Contemporary Art, Valletta; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Ludlow 38 (Goethe-Institut), New York; Ursula Blickle Foundation, Karlsruhe; and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam.
