Tobias Buckel

Slow Painting

Tobias Buckel is a painter who criticises images. He distrusts the visual communication of the mass media, whose images awaken insatiable desires. At the same time, he defends himself against the general acceleration of our present, which Paul Virilio described as early as 1990, both critically and distanced, as a "frenzied standstill". Tobias Buckel achieves attractive solutions with the explicit slowness of his painting. His paintings are a plea for persistent and processual work: "For me, painting resists rapid consumption. It is a 'slow' medium that can open up gaps in our viewing habits. Even if important decisions are often made intuitively in the studio, they are consciously made - they are reflected upon and evaluated, they are not random. And even the finished picture, in which all decisions coincide in one moment, subsequently requires time and attention from the viewer in order to categorise and evaluate what is depicted." Ultimately, Tobias Buckel's painted spaces are not real spaces, they have no volume, nor are they bound by the laws of perspective or gravity - there are no optical certainties in them. His pictures stage already staged templates; he constructs spaces, displays and landscapes from staged locations. These constructs remain in a fragile state of suspension, a balance of figuration and abstraction, description and randomness, completion and incompletion. Opposites are not played off against each other, but stand side by side.