La Grotta della Fenice – Una Passione Inconfessabile

Let others imagine themselves in the future, Tim Berresheim squats in his cave and works the hand axe. Of all people, someone who has been pushing computer-generated art forward with relish for the past 20 years, is turning to the Stone Age narrative. How early is this Bird? Berresheim keeps asking himself that. He wants to be early, the first perhaps. But he also doesn't want to get carried away by the assertion of a progress that has not yet proven to be such. Berresheim's large-format canvas works bear passion in their name, "Una Passione arcobaleno media" or "Una passione ornamentale più piccola". The colourful clusters of paint demonstrate a presence of painterly quality. Each fine hair is based on a UVW Map encased polygon. The compositions are calculated with sampling level ten. Compared to earlier works, there is noticeably more shine, more sweep - more brushstroke, one would think. The only difference is that no brush was used.

With the help of the computer, Tim Berresheim brings the unseen into the world. He seeks and creates images beyond the limits of human perception. Multi-perspective instead of central perspective, simultaneity instead of causal concatenation, superimposition instead of cropping. His photographic works on baryte show spaces that are not, cannot be and yet, as deliberately cut apart, interlocked laser scans of historical buildings, refer directly to an analogue reality and the artist's hand. Tim Berresheim sits in his cave, everything around him is in ashes. The whole world lies in ashes - literally, at least, considerable parts of it, metaphorically even more so, because the tipping point of bliss has been passed, salvation seems uncertain. Berresheim is looking for the place where the phoenix will once again emerge from the embers. This has happened before. 2010, "Phoenix - The Guilty Pleasure": Berresheim's first exhibition in the USA after the banking crash. The artist indulged in shameless devotion to a formal aesthetic beauty. Today he does it again, has actually always done it. The visually appealing is the driver of his exploratory practice, but not its purpose. Berresheim's latest works are of surprising rigour and clarity. An admission of the seriousness with which he taps expressive forms of the digital. Berresheim's technical finesse may not be fully understood through the experience of his work, but it can be guessed at. To make their potential tangible, he stages exhibitions as stage plays.

For "La Grotta della Fenice: Una Passione Inconfessabile" at Galerie Falko Alexander, a large-format wall piece becomes the backdrop for a rich narrative of the early phoenix in the course of history, spreading its wings, rising, burning out to become new from its own ashes. Berresheim uses the past to tell of a present that leans into the future. He cites futuristic body designs of the 17th century, the architecture of his own growing up, the opulence of the Baroque, set pieces of earlier works and hippiesque computer visions of networking dystopia. A look inside the artist's head reveals a crazy frame of reference from which the most diverse narratives can be spun, yet it is never about less than the whole - the whole in the sense of "everything at once". So it dawns: It is not those who hold the latest iPhone in their hands who grasp creative peak performance; the vast majority of all iPhone owners have no access to the most insane excesses of technological innovation. Behind the screen, people have remained cave-dwellers, scrolling at a low level of development for what may come. Tim Berresheim acts as the author of utopia in his digital cave. His hand axe is not a gadget, it is a transformation tool.

(Anna Meinecke)