Matthias Groebel’s exhibition “Skull Fuck” featured three of the television paintings he made between 1989 and 2001, along with three new monochromes, a trancey video, and two multipanel paintings from the early 2000s. Preserving pastness, the television canvases now broadcast nostalgia. The series emerged from the advent of twenty-four-hour, private satellite broadcasting in West Germany in 1984. Unprecedented access to a thick flow of roguish programming gave the Cologne-based artist, surfing at night, the subjects of these works in which snowy apparitions return through pointillist static with a distinctive gravelly sheen. With a glint in her cathode-blue eye, the woman in untitled, 1992, is a fascination of pewtery pixilation. Who is she? A halftone honeytrap, a lonely punctum, an orphaned siren whose doleful gaze bores into a classified beyond? A déclassé Greta Garbo, whose visage Roland Barthes venerated as “a moment of transition . . . an Idea”? In any case, this unnamed she is an effaced someone, hazed by the freeze of efflorescing electrons.
Desiring “a clean path from the electronic signal to the canvas,” Groebel fashioned his own painting machine in 1989, a decade before the widespread adoption of multicolor plotters. A Fischertechnik painting toy was its skeleton structure, which Groebel modified by assembling it vertically, scaling up its surface area, and replacing the toy’s original pencil with an airbrush. In cyberpunk spirit, Groebel robotized the apparatus with salvaged detritus: windshield wipers, plastic rollers, and bike chains. Select footage was then processed through software that converted analog signals to digital pixels that could be sprayed in acrylic, dot by dot, across the canvas. But consider: Such a machine demands tender maintenance. It does not fetishize the abdication of the hand so much as ventriloquize, to lushly narcotized effect, the very technicalities of painterly dexterity.
As television broadcasters shifted to subscription models in the early 2000s, Groebel returned to his own photographs and videos as source material. The vertical triptych virgins, 2002–2003, features tightly cropped images of shelved skulls whose cavitied features are shrouded by embroideries, their craniums exposed. Displayed in individual niches and bordered at the right by golden scrollwork, the skulls appear as hallowed yet anonymized relics. Here, the gauzy texturing of Groebel’s machine deftly captures the atmosphere of stale temporality. Dank chiaroscuro intermingles with filmy blue, lending the composition a moldered delicacy that exacerbates the impression of senescence while assuring fidelity to its lensed source. It’s a lossy, nauseous, and timeworn iridescence accomplished by liaising machines. Conceived from video stills, the nine-paneled collective memories, 2003, multiplies surfaces as dissonant interfaces with entropic translucency. Reflections spectrally overlay a proto-humanoid skeleton in a natural-history museum, with vitreous passages of calcium yellows and Hammershøi-esque shadows. The surgeons in untitled, 2000, backlit by the chronic glare of halogens, peer into the canvas’s center: With perception itself under operation, the painting-body hacks the viewer.
Three fractalized monochromes (all untitled,2024) originating in analog photographs of street life—roughly painted panels of pink, green, and turquoise—are encrusted with diagramming lines. To make these works, a scanner rendered Groebel’s photographs into datasets, each comprising tens of thousands of points, and an algorithm directed colored pens to connect set points. These optimized paths sketch themselves into tortuous obscurity: Densities of vermiculation imply a sunlit skull, planar surfaces, and abstracted architectures, while hyperactivities of black describe a texting figure and clustering foliage. Addling the eye, exhaustive hi-res ultimately ensures the paintings’ encryption. Unlike Groebel’s other works with their absorbing torpidity, these paintings nevertheless provide an alternate view of his informatic materialism: strategized line work as algorithmic craquelure.
Groebel’s necromantic technics shows a wicked empathy for digital desuetude. These are paintings of electrical traces and lo-res lyricisms with results glacially indeterminate. Continual transitoriness—transmitting, receiving, translating—imparts solemnity for incognito presences slipping from view, allowing that what touches us deepest is likely already lost, or wholly numbs us to its contact.
