Tobias Buckel

Slow Painting – Tobias Buckel is a painter critical of images. He mistrusts the visual communication of the mass media, whose images arouse insatiable longings. At the same time he resists the general acceleration of our present, which as early as 1990 Paul Virilio described, as critically as it was distantly, as “racing standstill.” With the explicit slowness of his painting, Tobias Buckel arrives at attractive solutions. His paintings are a plea for sustained and processual work: “For me, painting resists rapid consumption. It is a ‘slow’ medium, one that can succeed in opening up gaps in our habits of seeing. Even if important decisions in the studio are often taken intuitively, they are nevertheless taken consciously – they are reflected upon and evaluated, they are precisely not accidental. And the finished picture too, in which all decisions coincide in a single moment, subsequently demands time and attention from the viewer in order to classify and evaluate what is depicted.” Ultimately, Tobias Buckel’s painted spaces are not real spaces; they possess no volume, nor are they bound by the laws of perspective or of gravity – in them there are no optical certainties. His pictures stage models that have already been staged; out of staged places he constructs spaces, displays and landscapes. These constructs persist in a fragile state of suspension, in a balance of figuration and abstraction, description and contingency, completion and incompletion. Opposites are not played off against one another but stand side by side.