One must embrace the darkness in order to see the light. Having faced multiple cancels throughout his career, his work having been trashed even by Jerry Saltz, we might expect from Martin Eder to pull back a bit. The German painter did no such thing. Instead, in his newest solo show at Tick Tack in Antwerpen, Belgium, Eder decided to overwhelm the viewer with an abundance of images and noise, creating a surprisingly post-digital looking wallpaper collage of views into his chaotic cosmos of the search for enlightenment, in order to re-present his usual body of work. Juxtaposing ten large technically perfect oil paintings of hot girls, fat girls, oversized cats, dogs and one giant with a collage of his photographic works, unseen paintings and found and/or research materials, gives the paintings a certain seriousness, and the viewer the insight into the artist’s thought process that we might have missed before. He presents himself as roaming half-lost in the vast space of the internet, and not as a overly-clever, self centred troll or a brilliant intellectual above us all as Jonathan Jones of The Guardian incorrectly assumed – this new exhibition at Tick Tack can be seen as Eder’s study of fitting in. He did tone down on the hot young girls though. In the time of woke fundamentalists cancelling everything everywhere all at once and bourgeois pensioners vandalising paintings of teenagers sucking dicks in Palais de Tokyo, Eder’s older more pornographic oeuvre is far from socially acceptable, even though some of us can still be honest about missing it.
Like a modern-day Voltaire, Eder analises, comments and criticises contemporary society in a witty, seemingly banal way. He does so through images that, when looked at on a screen seem digital, but in reality show 19th-century academic painter’s mastery of the figure and a glossy mirror-like accuracy. His larger-than-life paintings of female bodies are not directly pornographic – their meaning is deeper in the artist’s mind, in the detailing of the humanistic imperfections expressed through the countless shades of skin, sweat and shines we can find in pieces such as the two metre-large Far Away, 2023, the newest piece of this exhibition.
“I’ve often had to explain that I don’t paint cats. No. I don’t paint naked people, asses or sunsets either. I paint what’s left of it. Nuclear radiation. I paint the afterimage, the burn-in image.” Martin Eder
Tijs Lammar, Mathias Swings and Patrick Vanden Eynde, who founded Tick Tack in May 2019, describe it as a “destination for contemporary art” in Antwerp. Tick Tack produces, presents and promotes international exhibitions and video art screenings, complemented by limited edition publications and an extensive digital archive, working from a historic duplex with a large 6-metre high window facing a lively intersection and a landscape park in the centre of the city. In Antwerp, an extremely art-saturated city, this experimental space exists between a gallery and a project space. Working mainly on site specific projects, they focus on artistic progress and the research of (public) space rather than solely sales. At sunset, the Tick Tack window transforms into a projection screen, constantly challenging the physical and mental boundaries between inside and out.
Eder transformed the 1955 Léon Stynen brutalist building into a site-specific mind palace-cum-atelier, distancing himself from salon or museum-like presentations of his work we have seen at Hauser & Wirth for instance. While such installations of overwhelming wallpapering of pixelated imagery are something usually done by student, emerging artists, Eder successfully appropriated this form into his practice. Though perfectly composited, the quick-art style of the wallpaper loosens the weight of the massive canvases and allows the viewer to view them from a more relaxed perspective – to take them less seriously only for their meaning to have stronger effect. Eder, as said, projects his message through wit and not weight.
The Basement Ceremony, Eder’s first performance in over 6 years, promised to offer the viewer “a cathartic experience, which will have had the opposite effect of a meditation: filling your mind to the most flamboyant extent and erasing unwanted content and mental trash due to social media.” While being musically very interesting, it was not carried out perfectly enough as a whole to stand in contrast with the exhibition and hence had no cathartic effect, even though the idea was clearly visible. Eder, with his monumental deep voice and large person, would possibly be able to offer a cathartic experience easier with less cling wrap and costumes. Though, possibly, his intention was to underwhelm and be overly esoteric in this part – the thought seems logical when reading the exhibition title.
Karmageddon is an exploration into the “fast dopamine” culture of the 2020’s, where the overwhelming production of imagery is constructing a visual discursive space in which truly authentic creation seems impossible. Tick Tack describes the show as “Eder questioning the role and place of painting in modern society, where hanging an image on a wall for an indefinite period seems almost anachronistic.” Truly, the meaning of painting or any other creation in the visual sphere is threatened by the unprecedented speed of digital, AI and vernacular visual communications. Visible clearly in the world of cinema with the recent films Titane, 2021 or Crimes of the Future, 2022, the only clear answer to this looming crisis of identity seems to be to overpower. Eder, though, decides to take a different path – he integrates – only to challenge the viewer to, through juxtaposition, try to see the unconscious processes of the effect of consumerism and digital entertainment on (beaux) arts.
