Dennis Hollingsworth

Ulrich Lamsfuss at Dan Hug

From the press release:

Daniel Hug is pleased to premier the work of Berlin-based Ulrich Lamsfuss in Los Angeles.

For his Exhibition ?Pet Sounds (West Coast)?, Lamsfuss has created a new series of paintings and drawings continuing his interest in the aesthetics of the banal. A monochrome still-life of a BMW engine, a close up of a bunch of tomatoes rendered in saturated colors, and a nude woman holding a bottle of perfume culled from an advertising campaign are just a few of the disjointed images he has chosen to render. Further complicating the matter, Lamsfuss will present an exhibition of identical paintings at Lombard Fried in New york opening December 9th, 2005 until January 17th, 2006. Depending on the image, Lamsfuss has made up to six ?copies? of the same work at times in a conscious process of eliminating the idea of a subject matter. His work is as much about the act of painting as it is about the process of stoic routine.

Dan explained that the "aesthetics of the banal" means that Ulrich believes that there is nothing new imagistically in our media saturated age. Therefore, he chooses more or less randomly from the sea of images in which we are adrift.

Check out the notes. A documentarian. Here is another drawing. And another here.

Since he painted double the paintings for two simultaneous shows, I wonder if he painted this image (looks like it was culled from a magazine ad) four times?

Double and double again, the banality of our times.
Damn our eyes!

Maybe he considers our world to be a rip tide sweeping us into the future? Struggling against such a surge is a fool's game. So, if he is going to lay back and float away imagistically, where is the play?

Between the far and near of painting, there seems to an alignment of:
banal image= the far view...
and the near view= the non banal,
...passionate view (and notably abstract like a nugget of a Chuch Close painting) .

If G-d is in the details, maybe Ilrich Lamsfuss is devout?

Witness, the closeups:

Closer.

Closer still.

Closer still.

These pictures don't really do much justice to Ulrich's paintings. Maybe that is a positive indicator? If the camera can't capture a painting, maybe the painting has something bigger than the flattening and... banalizing... effects of photo based media?

Let's look at the rest of the show:

The great artists of the king's court used to paint the figures of power. A courtier paints the court. Perhaps this painting is doing the same job? ArtForum is the sun king of the artworld after all.

And who among us can deny that our court is secular, progressive and multicultural?

An icon of our church of materialism, the mechanistic branch.

It reads like a deposition from the cross. I can look at the BMW engine and feel the sigmata sting in my palms.

Wow. (or doubleplusreverseungood!) This could come out of any domestic magazine.

Banal? Of course.

This is banal, surely.

But what I'm suggesting here is that something quite different is going on.

Ulrich Lamsfuss is not painting banally. He is not really painting banal things.

He is passionately painting subjects which happen to be besotted with banality. Because all subjects are banal (by his account), totalization of blah.