Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Thomas Eggerer at Friedrich Petzel

Thomas Eggerer at Friedrich Petzel
Art in America, Jan, 2005 by P.C. Smith

For his first solo exhibition in New York (after several in Los Angeles, where he works, and in his native Germany), Thomas Eggerer showed both small and fairly large paintings, drawings and collages characterized by transparent and contradictory gestures of representation and abstraction. They might be mistaken for an amateur Photo-Realist's composition studies, if they weren't so bold. Pencil lines, looking casually transposed from photo-projections, are visible under thin gestural washes of straight-from-the-tube acrylic color, alongside more earnest tonal rendering in generic grays. Even the subjects recall amateur art, and often include nice-looking children at school, at a playground, or swimming in a lake. Here, though, the children are small, barely individuated elements in compositions dominated by brutalist architecture. Several small works also feature a music conductor, an authority stick-figure, who is repeated with minor variations--in one case on both sides of translucent paper.

The simple collages of magazine photos (a medium Eggerer is showing for the first time) are not, as one might expect, sources for specific paintings, though they, too, often include pleasant children. But in the collages as well, the children seem less the subject than do the backgrounds, where one spatial situation gets twisted by juxtaposition against another, sometimes just by turning one scrap of magazine upside down.

Eggerer deftly balances himself in a sophisticated space of possibility, using simplified representational devices in a completely transparent formal structure, to hint at realizations of meanings while undercutting illusionism. In The Wisdom of Concrete (2004), the aggressive perspective of a modernist bridge is echoed by flatter, Franz Kline-style washes in the sky. Tiny figures of children hiking on a hillside below, one looking through binoculars, suggest a Saturday morning cartoon version of Caspar David Friedrich's figures looking into an abyss. Eggerer's use of screechingly synthetic hues--here cadmium orange--against dull grays and browns, is boldly ironic. The decisive switching of painterly gears between thin, gestural wash and perspectivally drawn, tonal rendering creates a tense, abstract plasticity. But in some works the consistent thinness of the painting can also seem like a thinness of effort, in place of a real determination to flesh out the contradictions of experience.

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