Dan Attoe
Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany
Dan Attoe’s new works at Peres Project try to figure out the discrepancies between male sexual fantasies and real women, working out ideas like diagrams scribbled on the backs of napkins. When it comes down to it, though, neither women nor art are that simple.
Attoe elevates quick doodles to the status of neon works: Looking for warmth (2008) renders his observations of human nature as an ensemble of ‘illuminating’ suggestions about the overarching state of being ‘Fucked in the head’. From here on, logical conclusions such as ‘Just like your uncle’ and ‘Letting ideas slip through’ are drawn. He adds, ‘All the wrong reasons’ and those ‘on the same trip’. The humorous twist of the material juxtaposition of cold neon light and the work’s written content sets the tone of the show and the compositional form of the other works.
Attoe combines these neon drawings with painting and small remarks written in pencil on the walls around the works. His writing continues his paintings; his neon drawings seem to be extensions of his writings on the walls. From a distance you could miss the small-sized words near the edges of a canvas.
Everything in ‘Simple Thoughts and Complicated Animals’ derives from the beautiful paintings that depict a group of bikers, masked nudes, a large natural monument, a couple on a busy dance floor, a murder scene, and a threesome in an office. Scenes from an imaginary road movie in which drunks and crazies, sex, violence, and cars amount to a strange cocktail of media-infused delirium. Office in the afternoon (2008) depicts a man and two women in a sexual encounter, while a large list of pornographic websites on the wall around it implies that the Internet is now a major producer of seductive realities.
Yet these could still be fantasies; when human relationships are concerned nothing is clear cut. The neon drawing Complicated Animal (2008) depicts a female nude on a cloud, and is subtitled ‘We are just complicated animals’ – which sounds like an easy answer when relationships collapse. Men are Women (2008) gives similarly frustrated expressions of sexual politics – ‘women are all the same’ and a ‘A pair of knockers ease the pain’. If it was ‘warmth’ (as in one of the work’s titles) that these voices have been looking for, it seems that what they end up with is some kind of boys-with-beer philosophy. Attoe depicts the dilemma with a mixture of affection and humourous distance.
Jörn Ebner
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