© 2013 ch-arts
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Opening: wednesday 14th february at 6pm
Have you ever thought about what remains after a car has exploded? What happens to the steering wheel, the rear-view mirror, can one still read the number-plates?
The picture, "Mercedes" 2000, conveys the frozen beginning of an explosion - a picture that is a part of a 5-part large format photographic series - which first becomes complete in the viewer’s imagination. The digital photomontage is just a basic anarchistic symbol of a deconstructive event - from a time when it was still cool to wear as many broken "Mercedes" stars on a chain around one’s neck as possible - behind which many more social layers of the artist’s background are hidden. Thus, the car pictured in the image belongs to a friend: from this point of view, one can trace the direct line of a complex relationship through the exposed presentation of the number plates. This way of reading creates out of the symbol of destruction a monument of remembrance, of transience, and at the same time an homage to a close friend. Or, at a location, the coordinates of which are precisely plotted through street signs, making them, thus, verifiable.
Yet even spatial structures are unstable, are subject to disintegration, restructurings and therefore deserve a monument. In this way, it can happen that on the one hand the double staging becomes a single production on the subject level, while on the other it becomes that which is staged as such, is produced anew: there is no difficulty in recognizing the image as a mounted one - suffice to say that any questions about reality are superfluous. This overtaxed battlefield of discourse is simply left behind, far more important are the specific criteria of painting with regard to the middle ground, lighting and surface structure.
The Zurich artist, Christian Andersen, born 1974, generates pictures on the computer and proceeds rather like a painter as regards compositional decisions, giving the picture a spin ("Spin that shit!" says Curtis Hanson the MC in the Eminem film "8 Mile") and through this process of creating pictures tells a tale as he steers in the right direction. Andersen uses here current symbols and sign language from the field of pop culture.
He gets his ideas for pictures straight off the street, there where the protagonists experience his pictures. Particular ideas for pictures result from observations of everyday life and encounters, resulting from his being himself a part of the street-life of London and New York. The collective material then goes through a process of evaluation. It is decoded, filtered and through new combinations with symbols from different eras of human historic development, is formed into a kind of pop-culture allegory. With the portraits of young outsiders in London ("Lick the Wick" and "Elizabeth") the quasi-romantic representations of old stones ("Invasion 1") and the picture of a lonely person at a bonfire in front of the historic anonymous skyline of New York ("Burning Mud"), Andersen distances himself more and more from the serial works of recent years and transposes the narrative potential to the various symbolic levels of an individual work.
Simone Schardt. Art Historian, Migros Museum, Zurich.
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