As if reflecting upon his own constant simultaneous engagement with the dialectic of abstraction and figuralism, Eggerer here occupies the point where both might begin or end. From the point of view of the focus of the new paintings, the four strokes of the letter M, all answers are defiantly arbitrary. Eggerer, focusing on the material of language as form, penetrates into the uneasy core of a traditional dialectic.
M (ɛm), the thirteenth letter of the modern German and English alphabets, as Ben Jonson put it in 1635 , “is pronounc’d with a kind of humming inward, the lips clos’d. Open, and full in the beginning: obscure in the end: and meanly in the midd’st.”
The work above is from this year's Thomas Eggerer solo show at Daniel Buchholz, Cologne.
The work below is from last year's Thomas Eggerer solo show at Daniel Buchholz, Berlin.
Italicized passages are taken from the gallery's press releases (translated into English by an elderly German computer).
One painting shows an unreasonably big yacht with crew members and hanger-outs on board holding in full summer action against the ocean waves, which are, compared to the graphically represented people, not at all defined, making the yacht somehow an image of a vessel, or a container of a group more absorbed with what happens inside of themselves, than with the space itself, the immense and deep world of the ocean.
Almost the same, or maybe even the same couple of young men as in the uncanny warp space walks down this time a declining ramp-like path, and behind we find a very textured space of dark floating colors. Maybe not one hundred percent correctly, but this work, the two downward moving figures in the space of a darkish universe, might include probably references to William Blake.
