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Thursday 6 February

Albert Oehlen: The Calculated Paradoxes of Painting

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Albert Oehlen, born in 1954 in Krefeld, is probably the only German artist who has managed to turn deliberate mediocrity into gold. Not the gold of art dealers, although his paintings now sell for millions of euros in major international galleries, but the philosophical gold of alchemists—the rare ability to transmute the lead of banality into a precious substance that makes us reflect on the very essence of art.

In his Swiss studio near Bühler, far from the Berlin social scene of his punk youth, Oehlen continues to torment painting the way a rebellious teenager would abuse an electric guitar. Except that today, at over 70 years old, his rebellion has transformed into a sophisticated methodology, making him one of the most influential painters of our time. It’s as if Johnny Rotten, the iconic frontman of the Sex Pistols, had metamorphosed into an avant-garde composer without ever losing his ability to provoke and disturb.

The first defining characteristic of his work is his embrace of artificiality. Unlike those artists who desperately seek authenticity in their gestures—you know, those guys who paint as if every brushstroke must express the torments of their tortured soul—Oehlen fully embraces artifice. He approaches painting the way Kraftwerk approaches music: by celebrating its constructed, mechanical, and deliberately artificial nature. This approach fascinatingly echoes Jean Baudrillard’s thoughts on hyperreality, the idea that our contemporary culture has lost all contact with the “real” and now functions solely through simulations and simulacra.

His method follows an almost scientific rigor in its approach to artificiality. Each painting begins with a set of self-imposed rules, like a game whose rules only he knows. For example, in his early works from the 1980s, he deliberately limited himself to restricted color palettes and awkward compositions, creating what he mockingly called “bad paintings”. These works, which at first glance seem naïve or poorly executed, are in fact the result of a sophisticated reflection on the very nature of pictorial representation.

When Oehlen paints his series of distorted trees on Dibond—those aluminum panels typically used for advertising—he is not trying to depict “real” trees. Instead, he creates signs of trees, simulations that remind us that all representation is artificial. These black trees with twisted branches set against garish magenta backgrounds resemble digital ghosts, glitches in the matrix of our perception. They perfectly embody what Baudrillard called “the murder of the real”: not just the disappearance of reality, but its replacement by signs of the real that are more real than the real itself.

His technique is itself a celebration of artificiality. The digital tools he began using in the 1990s with primitive computer drawing software are not employed to create spectacular effects but rather to emphasize the constructed nature of the image. Pixelated lines, repetitive patterns, and graphic errors are integrated into his compositions as evidence of their artificiality. This approach is strangely reminiscent of Nam June Paik’s early video experiments, where technical flaws became an integral part of the artwork.

This philosophical stance also manifests in his relationship with traditional media. Oehlen uses oil paint not for its traditional expressive qualities but as just another material in his arsenal of signs. Impastos, drips, and fingerprint marks are not there to express any emotion but to highlight the materiality of the medium. It’s as if each painting were a practical demonstration of Roland Barthes’ theories on the death of the author: the artist is no longer the expressive genius but rather the organizer of a system of signs.

The second defining characteristic of his work is his approach to programmed failure—or rather, his radical redefinition of what constitutes success in art. In the 1980s, while his contemporaries were striving to produce masterpieces, Oehlen embarked on what he called “bad painting.” But don’t be mistaken: his “bad painting” wasn’t simply bad; it was strategically bad. This approach echoes Samuel Beckett’s thoughts on failure in art: “Try. Fail. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”.

This philosophy of constructive failure runs through his entire body of work like a red thread. Each painting is conceived as an experiment where failure is not only possible but desirable. When he paints his chaotic abstractions, where layers of paint seem to battle each other like rabid dogs, he is not aiming for a beautiful, harmonious composition. He seeks the precise point where disorder becomes meaningful, where failure becomes revealing. This recalls Theodor Adorno’s idea of negativity in art: the notion that modern art can only be authentic by rejecting conventional beauty and embracing dissonance.

In his series of works from the 1990s and 2000s, Oehlen pushed this logic even further by incorporating elements of advertising collage into his paintings. These advertising fragments are not used for their content or message but as formal elements that disrupt and complicate the pictorial surface. It’s a strategy reminiscent of Situationist détournement, but without its explicit social critique. Oehlen is more interested in how these commercial elements can be transformed into pure pictorial matter.

Oehlen’s recent paintings often seem like the result of a fierce struggle between different modes of representation: gestural abstraction clashes with geometric patterns, figurative elements dissolve into explosions of discordant colors, smooth surfaces are violently interrupted by brutal impastos. It’s as if each painting were the battleground of an aesthetic war with no winner. This approach echoes Adorno’s negative dialectics, where contradiction is not resolved but maintained as a productive tension.

But this apparent chaos is actually perfectly orchestrated. Oehlen works within strict rules he imposes on himself, like a chess player who decides to play without his queen to make the game more interesting. For example, he has limited himself at times to using only the three primary colors, or at other times, exclusively grayscale. These voluntary constraints are not mere stylistic exercises but ways of exploring the limits of what is possible in painting. It’s an approach reminiscent of the constraints imposed by Oulipo members in literature, but applied to the visual arts.

What’s fascinating is that through this seemingly nihilistic approach, Oehlen manages to create works of staggering vitality. His paintings are not cold conceptual exercises but living organisms pulsing with energy. Even when he uses digital tools or advertising images, there is always something profoundly physical in his work, a presence that defies photographic reproduction. It’s as if painting itself were rebelling against its own nature while paradoxically affirming its unique power.

His use of computers is particularly revealing of this approach. Unlike many artists who use technology to create spectacular effects or simulate perfection, Oehlen employs it to generate controlled accidents and productive errors. His “computer paintings” from the 1990s, created with primitive software, deliberately exploit the limitations of technology. Pixelated lines, repetitive patterns, and graphic errors become integral compositional elements.

This approach resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s thoughts on difference and repetition. For Deleuze, true repetition is not the mere reproduction of the same but the production of difference through repetition. This is precisely what Oehlen achieves with his repetitive motifs and variations on recurring themes like trees or geometric structures. Each repetition produces something new and unexpected.

Perhaps this is where Oehlen’s unique genius lies: he creates paintings that are both profoundly intellectual and viscerally physical, that embrace artificiality while paradoxically remaining authentic. A painting that, as Friedrich Nietzsche suggested, dances on the abyss it contemplates. His works are like Zen koans—paradoxes that force us to abandon our preconceptions about what painting should be.

Albert Oehlen compels us to reconsider not only what painting can be today but also what it means to be an artist in the age of digital simulacra. He shows us that it is possible to sustain a vital pictorial practice while being fully aware of its contradictions and limitations. And perhaps that is the greatest lesson of his work: art does not survive despite its contradictions but because of them. In a world saturated with images, where the very notion of authenticity has become problematic, Oehlen shows us a possible path: an artistic practice that makes artificiality its very material, transforming the crisis of representation into an inexhaustible source of creativity.

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