Albert Oehlen recently had some paintings at Luhring Augustine that were structured in a remarkable way. Large, blatant advertisements are reproduced in high quality on large (five feet by five feet or more), traditional stretchers. Paint is applied to the ads but both the paint and ads remain almost entirely legible and totally distinct from each other. To read it, this idea does not sound like one out of which you would get a coherent painting. Somehow, Oehlen arrives there.
The way the work is put together, the advertisements should serve as a kind of background for the irregular, foregrounded painterly markings, but experience of the paintings does not bare this reading out. The primary challenge these works present is to develop an account of why these paintings are paintings at all.
Using well-known tropes in equal parts from Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism that Oehlen deliberately makes no effort to synthesize, the work succeeds by conflating both historical camps. In doing so it offers something new. The painterly gestures and marks are passed down from Abstract Expressionism but Oehlen uses them in a remarkably restrained manner that undercuts their wildness. They read as attached to the painting in the same manner that the ads are.
In spite of the ads being almost entirely visible, they don’t read as such. Oehlen destabilizes the camp elements as they are stripped of their commercial punch becoming their own kind of painterly data. The two elements, which should remain distinct in their contradiction, arrive at a condition of interdependence at which point they become illegible. Their illegibility allows the painting to emerge whole from this point of discontinuity. The work’s coherence as painting trumps the visual elements out of which it is made.
These paintings, for all their postmodern borrowing and baiting, border on the mysterious. Perhaps it is time to mention Oehlen alongside other German painters of prominence.
