post_modellismus – models in art - krinzinger projekte - Galerie ...

aware of common modes of perception
and models of explanation in different
ways. At the same time all these aspects
allude to the fact it is a photographic
representation which is only able to construct
something like objective, documentary
value under the cited conditions.
In the case of Oliver Boberg’s work this
presumed picture-immanent value of
photography is always called into question.
He thus refers to the far-reaching
conventions of this prototypical case of
photographic representation. In Boberg’s
photographic images we follow these
conventions, and discover in them not
just their conditioning but also ours.
Lois Renner is a painter. Or to put it more
precisely: he is a painter who has found
a significant way of dealing with painting
through photography. He dispenses with
the primary medium of painting so as to
test it anew by means of photography in
a very incisive and paradigmatic way.
Even if since the early 1990s Renner has
sought to overcome the ‘formal separation
between photography and painting’
and to ‘mix the two in a non-conflicting
manner’ 13 , he does not simply replace
the medium of painting simply by another
one; and he just as little merely
exchanges the constitutive means of
painting for those of photography. Rather,
painting serves him as a medium for
redefining the picture which in a more
general sense conflicts with the expectations
and object models opposing it.
Central to Renner’s definition of the picture
is a paradigmatic reconstruction of
his studio in which the myth of the
artist’s output is both celebrated and
discarded. In this model of the studio
Renner ascribes new roles to the objects
– completely irrespective of whether one
wants to refer to them as subject or
object, model or reality, photography or
painting.
The medium Lois Renner works with is
photography, but it is primarily painting
and the import of the myths it creates.
Using the model of his studio Renner
presents the institutionalization of artistic
production. He both buttresses and
subverts the discourse of concealed
production, ultimately rehearsing various
historical models of painting. Here the
painterly motif is always a photographic
one, but it only plays the role of one or
even more stand-ins. In the artist’s
words, ‘I do not deal with spaces but
with social, historical or ideological
forms which I want to keep or change.’ 14
It is thus in the power of the painter,
model constructor and photographer
Renner to keep or rearrange these
forms. In the process, model and photography
prove to be extremely suitable
means to dispose of what is meant to be
kept as relative truth and every order as
a merely relative order: in the sense of
‘lyrical visions which radically depart
from a claim to an objective reproduction
of a truth’. 15 That Lois Renner is able
to tap this profoundly painterly potential
precisely by means of analogue photography
is one of the paradox highlights of
his work.
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