Markus Selg. Sublimation/Simulation (Shadow of the Eye)

In this exhibition, his sixth solo show with Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Markus Selg examines the implications and meanings of working under the consequences of an unsubstantiated world, a world gone through total codification and turned into digital data, into an anonymous flow of bits and bytes. The works themselves are technologically produced. They are comprised of images the artist finds on the internet, of simulations, virtualized materials without presence, which seem illusionistic and imitative at first sight but in fact rely on the liquidation of all referents. Selg’s images do not copy things, they are the appearance of the world as a copy without origin.

The central section of the exhibition is a heterogenic group of collagistic prints on canvas. After a long period of narrative figuration, Selg has lately reduced his work into an abstract vocabulary. His recent digital paintings, whose palette still is the internet, include segmented samples-like patterns of different materials, textures and surfaces from an unidentifiable source. One can guess that in front of us are samples of marble, stone, fabric and tin, or fragments of cave paintings, murals and hieroglyphs, but all these intimations, rather than create knowledge, promote uncertainty and are experienced as indeterminate states. These works, executed with a technique called sublimation printing, enable the artist to implement perceptual and cognitive cracks, to expose the seemingly seamless screen of the virtual world as a thin crust that is now cracked open. They show us that this world is not a smooth screen, that the stability of the object’s content and contours is a deceptive indoctrination. That all changes and moves constantly.

The exhibition’s title announces two transformative operations: Sublimation and Simulation. It reveals the mechanism of the exhibition, defining each of the works as an index, result, effect of transformative occurrences, caused by conversion of libidinal energy into socialized motivation (sublimation in psychoanalysis), by transition of a substance’s state of matter from solid to gas (chemical sublimation), and by model-based generation of reality as hyperreality, as a system of self-denotative, unreferential signs (simulation).

The e-mail invitation indicates an image which is a good example of how Selg initiates and handles these occurrences, underlying each of the exhibition’s works. Incorporating a photograph by Czech artist Adam Holý it can be described as a transformation caused by the two types of sublimation mentioned above. While engaging in aestheticizing and neutralizing human sexuality, the invitation’s image also involves a chemical sublimation, i.e., a process during which the physical body becomes a recorded light, a photograph.

In The Beauty of a Jpeg – Compression (she/he), the relationship between a sculptural object and a photographic print is less polar and confrontational, but no less frictional. An anthropomorphized sculpture of a body with no extremities is placed upon a plinth whose upper surface is covered by a computer-generated print of a pixelated colors pattern. The creatural sculpture has androgynous features, it is both male and female, a mutative body and a mythological figure. The pixelated pattern demonstrates a process of turning a legible image into an illegible deformation, a result of an unsuccessful data compression. Both the sculpture and the surface upon which it is placed are different forms of decomposition. They both represent loss of characteristic information. They point at the category of distinctive identity as irrelevant. They formulate an algebra-like equation where each of them is an unknown, a variable.

Markus Selg uses technological deformation as a provider of abstraction. For him technology is not an equivalent of scientific knowledge but of haze and vagueness. He conceptualizes the technological as mythological and irrational. In the works Shadow of the Eye and Refuge (Ganvie) this approach is fully uttered. Shadow of the Eye is a canoe sealed with a print of an eye and Refuge (Ganvie) is a multichannel video with footage shot by Selg from a floating canoe in Benin, Africa. The eye in the Shadow of the Eye is directed upward but cannot reflect the all-seeing eye. This eye is a missing reflection, a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. It is a blind eye. Selg changes the symbol of Divine Providence into a surreal, subjective expression. It is no longer omniscient and transcendental. It becomes a metonym of desublimation, of the incapability to foresee, to know, to predict.

Ory Dessau