For Ramon Hungerbühler, painting is an experiment to show phenomena that threaten to disappear in the juxtaposition. In search of the poetry of painting, Hungerbühler sets out on a playing field of the spatial that opens up a contemplation on the relationship between reality and imagination, using a very own energy that may unconsciously underlie the pictures. In this sense, the ten paintings in the exhibition find themselves in a tension to which painting today is exposed: How should it exist alongside the new media?
Hungerbühler seems to have found the answer in a transmedial way of working by prioritising the craft of painting, but as the title suggests, not in pure innocence. Spectrally, the gasoline floats in the puddles, embodies beauty in the dirt, in the unclean, even in the threatening. What life gives - one organic, the other mechanical - is made impossible within the blend. Both become carriers, pure media, visual gimmicks - aesthetics.
Such an art is surprising. It lets neoplasticism, Manet's flatness and Nägelis stick figure aesthetics become one. Such a painting wants to be edgy, go wild whilst holding back at the same time. Flame symbols found in the world of skateboarding are mirrored by a pink line. A mountain landscape based on the instructions of a YouTube video can be found in a virtual-looking room, which could be a game of chess as well as Op-Art. Kilroy appears opposite, this theatrical symbol of teichoscopy, that reached the most remote places during the Second World War, and according to the myth frightened the Nazis into panic.
Perhaps it is precisely this teichoscopy that stands for Hungerbühler's work. By seeking to look beyond a horizon that is withheld from us. Such a painting withdraws visual certainties from the viewer which are excluded in favour of a horizontality. Such a painting must transform the spatial into a rhizome structure. Here discourses work side by side, without judgement, without hierarchy. No reality has supremacy that persistently whispers into the viewer's ear how the world would be perceived. This does not exist in painting. It remains a second degree image - a poetic grey zone for sensual stagings that oscillate between beauty and threat.
As in earlier works such as the trembling shadow figure threatening to fall back into the carpet of color taches, the possibility of disappearance remains omnipresent in Hungerbühler's new works - in that one layer challenges the other in its existence and stems the juxtaposition. Such caesuras run through Hungerbühler's practice as a painter. An unspokenness shines through them, an abeyance that cannot be captured in pictures or words. Whilst the stick figures, comic figures and an emoji-eske symbolism are affective, the monochrome pictorial elements seek to dampen all things expressionistic. Hungerbühler seeks to cause confusion in this fracture. His painting is situated within an intoxication, far removed from any systematisation. As the claws of the dinosaur stretch within the monochrome, the orange arms slick into nothingness - into a pure surface.
Written by Alexandra Looser / Translated by Jack Pryce
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