From the watery depths seem to emerge impalpable, indistinct forms; floating and transparent bodies, sometimes evoking human plasticity, sometimes that of algae or jellyfish, or some translucent and luminescent creatures of the abyss…
The world of the young Berlin painter is a strange, bottomless, and shallow one. Tim Breuerwho was a student of Peter Doig in Düsseldorf. A porous world where everything seems permeable: watery bodies, darkness as if pierced by light, iridescent shadows, like those mauves or greens at once so deep and so luminous… And when the paintings become opaque, the density of bodies and spaces is such that they appear impenetrable, gloomy, and mysterious; as if haunted by a heavy secret…
"Interstitial spaces"? "Figures in transit, both present and on the verge of absence"? "His stories are open-ended," "Wrote the artist and philosopher Hito Steyerl about the German painter, on the occasion of the exhibition dedicated to him by the Champ Lacombe gallery last year. Indeed, one does not know who comes, who passes, who overlooks these troubled waters and sinks into these midnight blues, these glowing reddish browns or these deep blacks… nor what these dense and multifaceted depths, these illuminated depths and these aquatic hues conceal."
Resulting from layers of paint scraped and erased as they were superimposed, these murky and unstable spaces create a confusing spatial relationship between the viewer and the canvas: seeming to mix scene and background, interior and exterior, reality and dream…, they plunge us into spatio-temporal indeterminacy, accentuating the strangeness of the solitary characters who haunt these shadowy areas freed from the power of reality to make us capsize towards dreams.
Champ Lacombe Gallery
7, rue Champ-Lacombe, Biarritz
Stéphanie Dulout