Every work of art is a child of its time and our times have transposed the development of serial work into serial watching and have compounded the result with the Gelage. “Binge-watching (the world collapse)” is the title Gabriel Vormstein has given to his current exhibition. Yet at precisely what points is our reality collapsing? In contrast to the situation in the years of the Cold War, we lack points of reference. While the mushroom cloud symbolized the possibility of a syncopal, horrific end to a history of disaster, we are still waiting for comparable fixatives to appear for our age. It seems that virtuality has driven a wedge into the relationship between the references and the signified.

This is the situation which Gabriel Vormstein’s large-format works take as their point of departure, adding layer upon layer. The foundation is the untreated, stretched canvas – placing an emphasis on the fundamental scaffolding of painting. What resonates here is the ancient view of Nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum. The subsequent layer is determined by diverse information media. Pages from newspapers or garishly multi-coloured adverts for basic foodstuffs form the second foundation level, from which aesthetic prints or drawings are derived. The basis of the grey-white-black stamped structures and forms is the potato, and with it one of the most fundamental of all printing techniques: the potato print. In the process, recurrent geometric elements cover over the motionless supermarket still-life, whose selection was arranged in line with the profit motive. Conscious and unconscious needs are represented by the printed support layer. Over this, Gabriel Vormstein lays structures that slowly morph into texts. From this textual material individual words come adrift – ‘sorry’ and ‘sorrow’ appeal to moral responsibility. Layer has been built upon layer so as to show us the current-day process of peeling away, as with billboards that have been pasted over thousands of times and which, through their own weight, come unstuck and splay out again. Around this process, flora and fauna cluster together – on the one hand as an organic reference which itself forms compost or radiates, and on the other hand as a pointer to the disappearance of manifold animal habitats. Among all this are clouds/Wolken, which as a snapshot in time hold fast the change of forms.

By stressing the intermediate spaces, the works succeed in furthering the overthrow of traditional understandings of valency and material aesthetics. The securing of evidence undertaken here establishes a possibility that points beyond an elegiac reporting on the world and nevertheless records it. In this way, it succeeds in making visible the affichist, poster-like character of the present-day world we perceive.

Aleksander Cigale

translated by Richard Humphrey