A Lonely wanderer in the middle of nowhere

Result #1

. . . . with a single eye, and a happy heart (all works 1990). It is the most spontaneous, the most playful, the most cartoonish. It is also the most familiar.And yet, for all of the similarities, there are some clear-cut differences: They are starkly lit in this piece, and all the faces and objects are gray. It is almost as if in the twilight of the world, the still-life apparitions that are the themes of Hockneys work are drawn to the edges of the circle, where they are swallowed up by the rest of the world. They are the red heads of the dead, whose emptiness is the contrast with the gray, which is the reverse. The black light is also on the other hand, giving a dreamy and haunting quality. In the final analysis, however, it is the phantasmagoric spirit of the images that constitute this abstract vision.

Result #2

A Lonely wanderer in the middle of nowhere—nothing is arranged in the world as much as everything else is arranged in the mind. And the mind is what you see.Jelivet, 2005–2006, in spite of the heaving weaves of threads, is a meticulously crafted and original pastel on canvas, a hand-printed signature on a small, translucent sheet of paper, and a framed collage of the topographical map of the city of Bremen. At first glance, the only thing to be seen here is a text fragment about a flight attendant from Bremen. Some translations: FROM BREMEN TO BAM, IN THE BEGINNING OF EVERYDAY LIFE, EVERYDAY YOURS ON THE RUN, A BIENNIAL WAS BRILLIANTLY DONE. And then the text changes, and a small black square shifts from above to below the frame, then a large black square, then a heavy black one, and then a text that comes to life, and then everything changes again. The words are written by the artist as a variation on his title, Random Procession, but the part of the title that makes most sense is the one that begins, every day, with no beginning, and runs without a end, and an infinite space in which things change and are constantly added to and removed from one another.Nothing is completely fixed. You find the silver-gray tarpaulin of the French poets and Alexander Brodsky (quoting from Goethe) wandering around, not quite beside a streetlight, but with the utmost certainty: All is right with the world. When Brodsky spoke of language, he used the word ancient to describe things that had just passed from the world to the world of appearances. Thats how I perceive it. I feel that this kind of idea of the word unknown is part of a way of thinking about language and representation that has been going on for a long time.

Result #3

—which is to say, something resembling contemporary abstraction. Its hard to say whether the idea of a solitary wanderer is a vestigial one; it makes a lot of sense. What are we to make of the fact that this wanderer, with his shirt open wide like a pirate-ship mast, looks at the viewer as though he or she might have come into his space; or that he or she is standing to greet someone, which, in another context, might be considered welcoming. Its a complicated thing, since one always has to add ones own language to the language of the other. So, although Fred Tomaselli may be merely reflecting on the historical avant-garde of his time, he is also reflecting on something quite modern: the power of images to awaken a sense of wonder. And one can say that the photographs, as well as the drawings, seem to have been a counterpoint to this wonder. What Tomaselli does best is to use photography as a means to generate an atmosphere of wonder; without it, the photographs become magical, which is to say, empty.

Result #4

. The movie is hard to watch and it leaves one wondering what the artist thought about the piece. However, it was in a dark, ramshackle house in the middle of nowhere, clearly designed to evoke the extreme outer limits of a human existence. A pile of leftovers from the film activity and a broken television antenna were part of the rubble. A stuffed female figure stood on a tiny table, her head seemingly entrapped in a still telescope—a faceless cross on a cheesy big cheese.

Result #5

A Lonely wanderer in the middle of nowhere (the artists own image), 2012, a series of photographs showing, in black-and-white reproduction, small, hand-painted miniature village domes and wooden houses in a landscape of volcanic rock and cracked earth. The communal temperaments of The Spontaneous Concoctions (Hors étoile, dessin, concreté) (The Coming [Horse, Dog, Ear], 2012), a set of photographs showing the artworks of a group of children wandering an urban park in Paris, evoked the ephemeral states of being that the children of all of us share. Little pieces of abstract surface poetry—a few in blue and red pencil, for instance—were presented in the form of the cartoons of children who are not their own (Hertrigratz/Mann als Du zu ältesten? [What if you werent a child?], 2012). And in the past of 2013, it was possible to stand in front of a marbleized Coca-Cola and walk on the imaginary ceiling of the room to hear one of the children say, If I had only had a cup of coffee, a small cup, to cover me in. Such gentle references were enhanced by the smaller, flat shelves of the glass vitrines whose layered bronze surfaces revealed themselves to be simultaneously desklike and anodyne: They had the look of discarded and worn-out, and their inner surfaces were seemingly cracked, like the marble-and-black-lacquered walls in a museum.One of the most striking elements of the exhibition was the fact that it could be thought of as an urban-reserve work, an alternative, usually far away, to the permanent art of gallery culture. When the project was first presented in 2011 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, for instance, it was an immense joke.