Paintings emerge from melancholy Review of Markus Schinwald's exhibition in Salzburg
Why is he feeling mournful? ‘I am observing a significant disappearance of culture,’ states artist Markus Schinwald. With social media, digitised information and AI, interest in history and historical contexts is waning. Increasingly, people are stuck in a loop of the present. This is evident on social media, where many things appear and then immediately dissolve again: ‘Everything consists of the present.’ Short-term memory is replacing long-term memory. ‘Social media has impaired the culture of remembrance,’ says the artist, speaking about his new paintings at Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg.
He describes how this affects humanity using the example of his profession, art. One of his students showed him paintings that strongly resembled those of Henri Matisse. When he pointed this out, she asked, ‘Who is that?’ After seeing Matisse’s work, she replied, ‘Well, I guess I got it right after all.’
The fact that 100 years lie between today and Matisse is no problem for the younger generation, explains Markus Schinwald. ‘They relate to the past the way AI does,’ Schinwald notes. Many artists of the younger generation merely work with shapes, colours and formats, but no longer know what they are quoting and what it originally signified. He states: ‘Without historical awareness, there is no interpretation.’
The new paintings at Thaddaeus Ropac are, according to Markus Schinwald, ‘images of grief and contextual loss.’ And they are a ‘counterprogramme’ to this memory cultivated in digital channels, ‘which is as short as it is fast.’ He painted them slowly: nine works in three and a half years. And he found a glorious twist to express the contrast between the analogue, the narrative past and the present: at auctions or in antique shops, he acquired small paintings from the 18th or 19th century and painted in their colours, style, mood – but added a different content. The old paintings are inserted into the new environment and fully incorporated.
A second aspect of the exhibition features woven images. Here, too, Schinwald interlaces motifs and production methods from past and present. Why woven images? The Jacquard loom, programmable with punch cards and often seen as a precursor to computer language, ushered in the industrial revolution, he explains. AI plays a similar role today: ‘The weaver of the 19th century is the interpreter of our present.’ Many of these professions, he adds, will no longer exist in five years.
