900 Calories
A vision once fulfilled becoming present and past is no longer a vision but reality.
From the first step into the installation “900 Calories” one is walking on unfamiliar terrain. The floor of the gallery which normally goes unnoticed has transformed itself into a lawn, apparently more outdoors than the concrete pavement before the door. This surreal contrast is exacerbated through the smell of cut grass and the bright artificial light.
The pictures, frozen snapshots from a staged scenario appear through their slick application of muted colour photographically realistic. A series of 14 works with similar subject like musical variations of a returning theme. The last picture in the series has been broken off, left consciously unfinished, holding the painful disharmony. A pared down application and extremely restricted choice of colours, give the works a fragility that compliments the sensitive motif. The person, sleeping perhaps dead, clearly floored from what has happened to him. The girl waiting to see what will happen next. Both have travelled a path together that ends here.
The positive reveals what is concealed in the negative, the life in the body that rises from the two-dimensionality of the canvas. Poised in the same position, the darkness holds the colours within itself and lets one hope for a different conclusion. The scene, on the one side realistic and on the other obviously composed, the physically strong and fantastical paintings lead one elsewhere, perhaps to a book or a film; a story which fascinates and yet from the viewers distance can be read abstractly.
Is the man on the floor and in the film one and the same? Running through Nuremberg, having lost his wife and daughter, his friends, everything that his life had been, experiencing through fateful encounters a modern day initiation of genuine suffering, without a priest’s or others guiding hand.
Just as he is actually in a room – which room at what time?
And not under a red sky, the stepper mistreated to exhaustion, the source of the story like the identity of the protagonist remains opaque.
The storytelling takes one captive. One follows the paths, Stumbling with him through the streets on the way to follow or deny his destiny, thrown back repeatedly into reality through the intermittent sobering calculations of the calories burnt so far. Obviously this is a baptism of fire, the suffering is authentic, and if the pictures are real or parables of the incomprehensible, remains a mystery. In this story the one who paints and painted these pictures envisions the separation from his beloved and the death of his youth and must discover that the drama of his life, which he magically fortells, becomes an event whereby not the terror but the Magic through its actual occurrence isn’t acknowledged rather on the contrary is lost.
This installation is of pivotal importance in the story of Artists Anonymous. The decision to abstract and alter through purely painterly means, the integration of half-documentary fragments and the deliberate falsification of reality on the one side and the conscious stage-management of a multiple layered narration on the other, through entire series of installations and exhibitions following the story which fuses the worlds without and within. The protagonists and members of this life-size concept dedicate their lives to the service of Art, to be taken over, to lose themselves so as to fill the creation of this world with life.