Ohne Titel

Matthias Weischer's dream-like paintings describe a bizarre modern world of artifice and illusion. A mixture of implausible but still possible motifs painted almost as if by collage, his landscapes and interiors mix the mundane architecture and design of the modern inner city with wild and exotic natural settings to create new pictorial worlds of possibility and the suggestion of other realities. In this untitled work from 2001, Weischer creates a mural-like portrait of a brilliantly coloured Toy-Town-like tower block that calls to mind a modern beach-front development situated in an oasis on the edge of vast desert. The oasis, rendered in a Hockney-esque manner and aping the faux- exoticism of Henri Rousseau, not only asserts another different kind of artifice but also seems, like much else in the painting, to be partially a mirage.

By scraping away at the painting in places as if to suggest damage and the wear and tear of the passage of time, Weischer dates his seemingly futuristic visions in the past, conjuring a strange sense of nostalgia while also exposing the innate artifice of the painterly process. Belonging to no time and describing a netherworld of the imagination that exists only within the logic of painting itself, Weischer's paintings are like the architectural projections you find on building-site billboards advertising the look of some future development. In this work, with its giant portrait of a giraffe on the side of the tower block and its small ball-like clouds floating like pills in the infinite blue of the sky, this visionary fallacy describes a faded futuristic dream of an Africa halfway between Thunderbirds and the Adventures of Tintin.