Untitled (House)

Often working on an epic scale, Dirk Skreber's paintings monumentalise the banal and the ordinary. Untitled (House) appears a simple, empty landscape--frozen and devoid of movement--yet the immediacy and clarity of Skreber's representation seems to point to a striving of photorealist perfection. However, an interpretation of this kind would only limit the many facets of Skreber's paintings. Through employing the method of appearing real and objective, Skreber confronts viewers with a kind of troubling hyperreality. This hyperreality is both familiar and distant, recognizable and yet completely imagined. It becomes the architectural unheimlich, the uncanny: a commonplace landscape translated through the lens of mechanical reproduction, and then once again retranslated by Skreber through the medium of oil on canvas. These various layers of translation act as methods of distancing the viewer from the original scene and similarly, mirror the way in which people approach media and information consumption within contemporary society. Today, the constant stream of high-resolution imagery, from television screens, personal computers to tabloid newspapers and mobile phones, has slowly created an edifice of visual culture within contemporary society, a complex and interconnected anatomy of visual signifiers which people have grown accustomed to living within. In growing accustomed to a post-modern world of abundant signification, it is easy to become desensitized. By championing the banal and exploring the ordinary, Skreber returns to the visual language of today and to its practitioners, the power to recognize how the age of mechanical and electronic reproduction has in fact shielded our eyes from seeing the most genuine and mundane forms of the sublime.