Emil Holmer
Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, Germany
Mobilization Table (2004–7), an open-sided steel-framed cabinet, is filled with daggers fashioned from lighters, tool handles, and shards of metal or glass. Bright pink insulation foam rests on its shelves like freshly harvested innards. Knives, axes and cans of insect repellent dangle into it from bungee cords. Lit from within by bulbs and halogen lamps painted silver or dusted with glitter, the work is not so much an installation as a shrine to improvised violence.
‘Dead Letters’ is the Swedish painter Emil Holmer’s first solo show in Berlin. His Mobilization Table is a sort of mission statement for his approach to painting: the canvas is a frame into which objects are assembled over and against each other, and techniques are hand-made weapons for dissecting materials. Collages of pornographic material meet total abstraction; media swap roles. The paintings are composed like installations from smaller paintings of sculptures, clusters spaced across the canvas, or piled on top of each other.
Holmer’s palette consists mainly of fluorescent colours, and his primary motifs are logs stacked in spiral formation and neon light sculptures projecting from the canvases at oblique angles. His paintings are dense and multi-layered, but perform a strip tease: if you look for long enough, a flash of bare canvas will expose itself. At the other extreme, paintings like Old Hole Fever (2010) and Hole World (2009) are naked canvases, tattooed with neon clusters and spotted with charcoal scrawls. In Hole World, the wood grain pattern of a pile of logs disintegrates into the motif of a speeding bullet, and then a pattern of tears. In Untitled (Erasehead) (2010) an army of log stacks bursts out of a comic-book flash, cut into a dirty, bright-green wall. Overlaid with porn collages the log piles turn into pyres that hint at witch burnings, as if pornography is the igniting force of some dark order.
Holmer’s motifs compress to form an image system that slowly solidifies. Random doodles of diamonds and discs appear to turn into voodoo inscriptions. Coloured paint trails criss-cross to form circuit boards in Old Hole Fever, and papier-mâché porn scraps peel from the surface of the paintings like scabs. In Endline (2010) and Teleprompter (2009) a scroll of words running along the bottom of the paintings substitutes oracular 24-hour news scrolls with bizarre neon pronouncements (‘ESLOWPUNCTUR, ERASSEHEADD,’). In Electric Birth (2010), the technique is applied without words: a double neon bar stretches across the base, melting into an urban skyline reflected in a rubbish-filled canal. Above the narrow horizon, Holmer paints a collective nightmare of the sleeping city, or else a vision of what it might really look like if you could flay its architectural skin. But beneath the vision, competing orders erupt. At the deepest layer lies a charcoaled grid like a word search puzzle. In another, parallel coloured bars bend and intersect like an underground map.
Attempts to impose order on these works collapses, giving way to gestures of anger, like the graffiti tags Holmer applies to his urban nightscapes. In Neon Mud (2010) they menace from the corners, or charge at each other, smashing into a kind of chaotic unity: an explosion of splatters in the window of an erotic video store – as if the films have come to life to attack their vendors. But along the fault-lines in these realities, visions coalesce. Left just visible in all the paintings, the bare primed canvas suggests that underneath all this is a kind of serenity. A simple truth underlies the confusion and terror and violence. But it’s difficult to hold onto – confusion terror and violence are very seductive.
Three words recur throughout the paintings in ‘Dead Letters’. They run in a rolling ticker across the bottom of Megapolice (2010): ‘Empty. Fill. Erase.’ In Endline, a dark black mesh in which Holmer’s motifs appear trapped, the words are painted on in bright colours. As in a play, impossible actions surface as words. Here, a negative triangulation daubed on, they’re a grinning acknowledgement: these are not imperatives, but crazy and impotent desires, and the three things you can never do.
Sam Williams
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