Daniel Karrer

Hands Dripping Red With Sunrise

December 11 2016 – January 29 2017

In tune with the spirit of the post-internet generation, Daniel Karrer (b. 1983, lives and works in Basel) finds most of his visual inspiration on the Internet. The processing and recombination of the raw material he finds online leads to a layered body of work that offers a surreal interpretation of virtual reality and its consequences for our current society. The subjects in Karrer’s work are derived from a wide range of visual and thematic contexts available on the Internet; most are representational, and they all meet uniquely on a two dimensional surface, within the medium of painting. The result is a group of paintings that are diverse in style and employ varied formulations: impasto brushstrokes meet with translucent layers; photorealistic representation coexists with spontaneous painterly marks. Karrer's floating imagery and stylistic inconsistency joyfully reveals the illusionistic character of both the medium and his sources.
For his show at the Kunsthalle Winterthur, Karrer explores new territory. Centre-stage is a series of reverse glass paintings, all produced during the six-month Atelier Mondial residency in Berlin this year. The flat and colour-intense surfaces evoke LED monitors and touchscreens, while at the same time the artist experiments with the layered image buildup inherent to the reverse glass technique. Instead of the perspectival construction found in Karrer's earlier works, the image space is now largely defined by gradients and directional changes of brushstrokes. Yet another novelty in the show is a reverse translation of painting into digital representation in the form of a new untitled video work, made in collaboration with Karrer's brother, the musician Stefan Karrer. A computerized voice-over accompanied by the layering of synthetic sounds makes up the soundtrack to the piece. Much like in a computer game, the surfaces of Daniel Karrer's paintings are here animated, morphing into a polygonal landscape, shifting in and out of focus, inverting themselves or seen from a birds-eye perspective. Instead of prioritizing painting over digital media or his source material, the video exemplifies an approach to making that forgoes hierarchies, focussing instead on creating dialogue between what are often regarded as autonomous or incompatible disciplines.

Joëlle Menzi