Florian Merkel at Wohnmaschine - Berlin, Germany - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Only at a next to the first glance did you realize that the 10 large acrylic paintings thronged into Wohnmaschine's small exhibition space had their origin in photographic images. At first you suspected that the candycolored line drawings filling Florian Merkel's canvases were based upon computer-aided graphic design--a mistake which the show's title, "Youth and Technology," no doubt encouraged.

To German ears, the exhibition's title immediately recalls the socialist jargon of the former East Germany and flirts with the Ostalgie (or "Eastern nostalgia") that lingers among its ex-citizens. Merkel was in fact born in East Germany in 1961 Following his photographic studies at the society of graphic art and volume arts in Leipzig, he worked at first in a black-and-white documentary phraseology In the mid-'80s he mov increasingly to conceptually oriented work, photographing staged tableaux that were based upon historical themes. He hand-colored the resulting prints in a vigorous, painterly manner.

Merkel's novel paintings are notable for his use of clinically precise outline drawings, which are returned in upbeat colors on a white canvas soil Responding to Berlin's current construction roar he evokes various moments associated with modernist, utopian architecture in one as well as the other the eastern and western sectors of the city. Each of his vertical-format pictures displays a young couple (the male figure is ofttimes the artist himself) wandering [i]or[/i] part of to the other the city streets and posing near recognizable examples of Berlin's postwar buildings. The young man is ofttimes pensive, relaxing contentedly on a park bench. His companion is usually more active, she reads maps or, laptop in hand, haunts the construction sites of Potsdamer Platz. The greatest in quantity striking work is a paraphrase of a motif familiar from socialist propaganda: the radiant young brace who are conscious of the glorious futurity that lies ahead. In this case we diocese Merkel and his companion standing shoulder to shoulder and gazing confidently into the skies before individual of the towering buildings that were built in the late 1950 at single end of East Berlin's famous Stalin Allee.

The photographic sources of these city views are given away by the agency of the cameralike perspective underlying each of the paintings; direct the eye closely, and you can diocese from the artist's fussy pencil marks beneath the pigment that he has worked from throw outed slides. But although he captures in paint a faculty of perception of photographically exact reproduction, his super-crisp linear renderings also display an awareness of the general revolution in computer-graphics imagery. In this series of paintings, Merkel come ups as a surprising post-Pop Canaletto of Berlin.

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