Consider the work of Oliver Dorfer as existing between this data and dread. Painting, an mnemonically rich and historically durable media, pushes away the fear of erasure with irascible permanence. While it evokes numerous ruminations, it simultaneously endures as a physical catalogue of data. Dorfer’s work occupies this realm, wherein a plethora of signs are co-opted,compiled, re-assembled, humanized, and left to exist.
In the pulproject/… , Dorfer’s first solo exhibition in New York, the artist presents four new large scale paintings, each displaying a trademark gloss that is enhanced by painting back to front on Plexiglas. The resultant image becomes slick, lush, and super-flat, mimicking the aesthetic of Dorfer’s source material, but also belies humanism in its purposed disregard for obsessive paint handling. Ultimately we have simultaneity of fast cultural data and a psychological-mnemonic translation-representation thereof.
Take for instance the painting thepulpproject01 (2008). An amalgam of anime influenced creatures, a seemingly female torso, and an appropriated abstract mark are combined seamlessly into a single, lamb-like, image. The raw material for this comes from a global language of everyday signs and pictograms that are taken compressed and assimilated. The final conglomerate image, which is created through layering in Photoshop, is then painted bluntly,brightly, and earnestly.
Born in Linz, Austria in 1963, Oliver Dorfer has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and Asia, most recently with Hilger Contemporary in Vienna, Jung-Bong Lee Gallery in Seoul, and Bonelli Arte Contemporanea in Mantova. This is his first exhibition with Freight + Volume.
