Matthias Groebel at DREI, Frieze London 2023

You can almost hear the static

The surfaces of Matthias Groebel's (b. 1958, Aachen, Germany) paintings are ultra flat, stuttering. Depicting close-up mugshots, corralled from quotidian television programmes from the late 1980s and 90s, the portrait paintings included on DREI’s Frieze London booth are strangely resonant. Picturing their protagonists in the moments before impending action, here, wide-eye facial expressions twist and contort, bruised coloured, conveying in their stiltedness something of the non-diegetic sounds used in the cinematographic industry to give shock and suspense a shallow sheen of seductiveness.

Matthias Groebel, works from Broadcast Paintings series, installed at Frieze London 2023

Coming from Groebel’s wider series of Broadcast Paintings (painted between 1989 and 2001), these faces each have a somewhat sun-bleached tone, one that casts their protagonists in a nostalgic light—or at least a soft-grain light I associate with the low-resolution screening technologies of the late 20th-century. This is not to say that Groebel’s works are sentimental or dewy. With their dulled, blotchy skin the faces pictured shine out from their mat material body (acrylic on canvas), radiating with a cold heat. In a counterintuitive way, to me, this aesthetic quality echoes something of the perceptive feel found in Dan Flavin’s neon works. That is, to me they accentuate a sense of alienation found in mass-media technologies and the numb ring of the entertainment industry. (With a focus on the maximisation of pathos, the spectacular way these industries export emotion ultimately renders their subject—perhaps wider social life—debased of actual human feel; in this type of cinematographic staging red-hot rage or cool-blue thinking, becomes nothing more than tepid corner lighting.)

Groebel’s painting process riffs on this aesthetic debasement of human emotion. Indeed, his works riff and re-screen the shallow scripting of human emotion, turning these spectacular snapshots outwards through a process of tactical machine-aided painting. Inspired by the newly available technologies of the 80s, specifically the technologies that allowed analogue images to be transferred into computer pixels, Groebel sought to push this process of transference one step further by creating a machine which allowed him to ‘paint’ these pixilated images directly onto canvas. Constructed from found photocopiers and windshield-wiper motors, this painting machine is what gives Groebel’s protagonists their sense of stuttering strangeness. Like an old-school printer, this machine can only paint with one colour at a time, meaning that the final painted images have a bleedy fuzz feel — their soft grain bruisedness.

Matthias Groebel, Untitled, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 95 × 95 cm

On his website, we can see a short video of Groebel’s machine in action. Here, following the beep, beep, tickerly tap tap of early computer start-up screens, we are able to see a flicking image and then the ambivalent arm of Groebel’s contraption as it goes about its laborious work of painting this image pixel by pixel, layer by layer. There is something trance-like in watching this machine at work; there is a sense of mystery and intrigue that hold me in suspense. Much like his completed paintings, this cropped encounter has a seductive opaqueness, something that inverts narrative exposition, highlighting the hallucinatory affect of digital image technologies on contemporaneous way of living.

Toby Upson