Slow Painting

Tobias Buckel is a painter who negotiates images. He mistrusts the visual communication of the mass media, whose pictures evoke desires that remain unsatisfiable. At the same time he ­resists the general acceleration of our present, which Paul Virilio already in 1990 described – both critically and detached – as an »accelerated standstill«. It is Tobias Buckel’s explicit slowness in his painting that yields attractive solutions. His paintings are a plea for persevering and ­processual work: »Painting for me resists fast consumerism. It is a ›slow‹ medium that does ­succeed in opening up gaps in our viewing habits. Even if important decisions at the studio are often made intuitively, they are still made deliberately – they are reflected upon and evaluated, they are by no means accidental. And the finished picture where all decisions coincide at one moment in turn demands time and attention from the viewer in order to understand and evaluate what is depicted.« Ultimately, Tobias Buckel’s painted ­spaces are not spaces, they neither possess any volume nor are they committed to the laws of perspective or gravity, nor do visual certainties apply to them. His works are stagings of already staged models, he refers back to staged places, constructs spaces, displays and landscapes from them. They linger in a fragile state of suspense, a balance of figuration and abstraction, description and coincidence, completed and also unfinished. Opposites are not played off against one another, but assert themselves side by side.