Dirk Skreber

It Rocks Us … radiates with the most stylish glamour: a pure liquid horror that is truly breathtaking to behold. The high-gloss sheen of media imagery is reinvented through painterly effect, the medium capitalising on its own qualities of oily seduction and alluding to nothing but its own materiality and surface.

Painted by Dirk Skreber in dispassionate grey tones, the subject matter is completely dehumanised. The double image, like Warhol's prints, suggests an emotional absence. Icy in its clinical detachment, It Rocks Us… offers an empty spiritualism, transfixing the viewer with its awesome and ethereal presence.

In It Rocks Us… Dirk Skreber sells revulsion on the merits of sex appeal. Painted with the soft focus of advertising, his car crash doesn't glorify death but renders it more intimate through the astringent gloss of pop. Dirk Skreber's mesmerising painting broaches the unthinkable. Alluring in its sterile beauty, the surface promises nothing beyond our commodified conception of the infinite: a terrible fascination glimmering with airbrushed newness.

Aerial views of surveillance photography and replication of print media are antiseptic placebos of intimacy: unnatural modes of viewing that have become instantaneously familiar, an essentially indifferent way of experiencing the world. Dirk Skreber doesn't strive for photorealism, yet his work borrows from the tropes of mechanical reproduction. Translated into painting, these devices are uncanny. Untitled, a spectacle of catastrophe, becomes a cerebral deliberation of poetic form through Dirk Skreber's intervention.

Interrupted with harmonious composition of shapes, Dirk Skreber's luminescent colour field is an exercise of pure aesthetics, a painting boasting formal perfection. In Untitled Skreber uses natural disaster as a means to negotiate the problems of painting: the sublime contemplation of modernism is transferred into a more frightening contemporary construct, where personal psychology is subsumed by the public realm. Incorporating tape to create a disjointed effect in the surface, he creates a textural stress undulating beneath the placidity of the scene.

Dirk Skreber reinvents trepidation as a normalised condition of collective consciousness: awe as a symptom of mass-media proliferation; spirituality as an achievement of design.

Untitled portrays an ordinary image, the kind seen in a million postcards and magazines. Rendered on a monumental scale, Dirk Skreber reconstitutes the mundane as the object of an all-consuming fixation. Completely static, the painting is removed from all measurable qualities of perception. It represents a generic stand-in for overwhelming sensations of inadequacy and incomprehension.

Suspended in time and space, Untitled occupies an incalculable gulf between charisma and disaster, a reflection of the numbing state of contemporary consciousness.

Dirk Skreber's Untitled offers an eerie sense of stillness, his monumental locomotive frozen in a moment of detached anticipation. It's not the actual subject that Skreber portrays but the haunting quality of it. He savours the illusion and contradiction of technique. Merging collaged elements of foil tape and foam rubber into the painterly surface, Dirk Skreber creates a tension between the abstract and representational. The dented steel of the train, the impenetrable gradient of the sky, and uncertainty of the dusty ground belie their artificial construction, each generating an austere, intangible quality. Sublime in their unreality, they culminate in an apprehensive tension where anything (or nothing) might happen.

Untitled’s aseptic perfection is a result of omission. Made up of conjoining flat planes, the image has a model-like effect. Flawless sky and pristine mechanics allude to precision assemblage: removed of all gritty detail, this tableau has been rendered ideal. The expanse of life-like drifting snow sets the scene in the surreal: helplessly remote, his train exists more as a concept than an actuality. Magnifying the banal, Skreber triggers feelings of anxiety through a sense of pre-determination. Taking advantage of the viewer’s conditioning to associate amplified images with historical significance, he paints his yellow train as a toy in a grand master plan designed by the collective conscience.

Dirk Skreber's futurist building is as alien in its construction as its isolated setting. Stretching to an unlucky 13 floors, this glass skyscraper suggests a contemporary Tower of Babel. Encapsulating the trappings of opulence, Dirk Skreber's precarious structure sits in impending conflict against the encroaching forest, the surrounding territory neatly divided between cultivation and wilderness.

The highly formalised building heightens disorientation, creating an Escher-like turmoil in its effete geometry. The glass casing suggests a terrarium of modern living; a foible society under the watchful gaze of a much more powerful presence.

Untitled's maquette-like structure offers a surreal mystique both in its setting and construction. Dirk Skreber approaches monochrome painting as a problem of spatiality. His colour field isn't rendered as a flat plane, but as a multitude of layered surfaces. Dull tones advance and recede in muted perspective, each shape seeming to defy gravitational logic.

Dirk Skreber uses aerial perspective to enhance the dizzying effect. The image is in fact a shopping mall roof: a generic icon of lifestyle comfort. Made strange in its oblique angle, Skreber dehumanises the familiar, conjuring ominous thoughts of horror films; inconceivable desolation in a place of intimate consequence.

Untitled presents a conflict between presence and absence. Lines cut in relief through a sensuous layer of foam play ‘peepshow', suggesting the outline of a sultry tattoo motif.

Referring to the voyeuristic act of looking through blinds or the low quality transmission of video footage, Dirk Skreber distances the viewer from an intimate reading. Instead, the familiar emblems of sexuality and kitsch simply become a problem of design. Seductive only in the materials of its making, the image floats intangibly between foreground and back. Dirk Skreber paints desire neutralised in a nowhere space.

Skreber’s abstract paintings incorporate all the unrest of his pictorial work, but reduce the uneasy tension to a purely formal level. In Seele, Skreber exploits the rough material of the board, exposing the essence of the picture plane, nails and all, as a purely constructed surface. His rigid painted and taped lines subvert the stability of the grid like composition, creating an optical effect of corrugated disorientation.

Carving through his built-up veneer, Skreber subliminally reveals a kissing couple, a provocative image estranged from emotive connotation. Seele blurs the boundaries between sculpture and painting, flatness and perceived space. It is less a painting than a falsified architectural form.

Skreber’s figurative paintings are painfully expectant. His imposing scenes of the banal lie in wait, trapped in epic canvases promising imminent drama and historical significance. In Untitled, Skreber’s spartan scene of a rural cottage is dissembled through its own making: the tidy precision of the home is rendered surreal by the chaos of the surrounding timber piles; the serenity of the sky is marred by the scratching towers of trees and violent chimney sparks.

The overall effect is one of tenebrous anxiety. The slightly aerial view aggrandises the conceptual scope of the painting. An identical house with identical woods is viewed in the distance: a promise that this creepy isolation goes on for ever.