Manuel Wagner

Drops, ghosts, showers of color

Flower hedge, fire department, dinosaur. A bespectacled man lifts a cat. Someone is looking, green running from their eyes. Kissing in front of the white gate of the entrance, behind it the gaping mouth of a fighting dog. Baring its teeth, gums shining bright pink. Hands gently feel across the blue. That beautiful back. A hunting dog scene, the grace of tense bodies, ready to plunge into the thicket at any moment. Drink on the table, cat in the pond, bubble, bubble, clouds. Swathes of rainbows, formations. Stains to silhouettes, mucus. Grainy violet. Coffee at the moment of its spill. The delicate wrinkles between a woman's legs. Blades of grass emerging from the cracks between the concrete sidewalk slabs. Two cute, fuzzy puppies with pink eyes, and the sky painted bright blue. Laughing mouths at a family reunion. We're doing well, we're having fun. Stains still from dyeing Easter eggs, red, blue, green, dripping. Love it or leave it. A house in the countryside, palm trees, stilts. Hairy soft parts without context. A racing bike lies there, completely bent. Single fingers of two hands rummage around in something. Searching hands and torn paper. Ghosts and splashes. Ghosts, sperm, a rainbow. Spirits, snowflakes, a little cloud. Men with horses are traveling in the desert, one wearing a cowboy hat. Ornaments proliferate across the sky. Sometimes the eye finds an eye. They look at each other briefly in astonishment. Life drips lusciously from Manuel Wagner's pictures. Fundamentally it is painting, but it is also photography. Above all, it is a constant process of image processing, using every means at its disposal. Varnishes and acids are used, photos are painted over, etched, new photos are added on top, a detail. In many layers and work steps, all in parallel. The images are already in close dialogue at the moment of their creation. Photography and painting are not an either/or in these pictures; rather, they wrestle like siblings, like kittens. Ultimately, they marry. The unconditional desire for the image demands everything to come together. Thus, the images consist of many layers, either applied or scraped off. Is the paint already dry? Is it varnish or glass? More like a relief than a mere picture surface, one involuntarily wants to touch them. And the images are not shy. They don't bite, but some do bark. An alchemy of image creation is at work here. Self-forgetful and highly concentrated, she follows the intuitive rules of the moment, similar to a musical improvisation. Driven by a painterly playfulness that is always also serious, this working method is neither cautious nor neat, but rather very bold. The images are fragments of stories, they are many narratives with very open edges. They don't tell fairy tales; rather, they tear individual pages from the storybook of everyday life, leaving us alone with them. This doesn't satisfy, but rather intrigues. It's like a game: an invitation from the image to linger, perhaps take a stroll. The beginning of a story. But then the gaze immediately slips, slips, for the image is unexpectedly distorted. Like a hiking trail that abruptly ends in mire. The images wreak havoc on the gaze: they entice, seduce, disappoint, and then entice again. Devotion, renunciation, even cheeky. It's a vast concoction, a mixture. An overall picture made up of many individual images. Their view of the world is veiled and turbulent, at times melancholy. And certainly also kitschy, garish, and corrupt. The images counteract the flood of images of our time and at the same time create a new, yet entirely different flood of images.

Miriam Albert