Marcelino Stuhmer
Little Triggers
17 May 2003 - 28 Jun 2003
Playstation is proud to present a solo exhibition by the American artist Marcelino Stuhmer (Salt Lake City, 1971). Stuhmer graduated from the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam in 2002, and has been included in various international exhibitions. The artist uses different media like painting, photography, and video, sometimes combined in coherent installations. For Playstation Stuhmer produced a new series of paintings; in 2001 the artist received the Royal Stipend for Painting.
The exhibition in Playstation is called Little Triggers - the subtle impulses that are unlocked from a gaze, or a gesture; the non-verbal signals we use to communicate moods and intentions. One could refer to Stuhmers work as mediatic - apart from a painterly investigation into the possibilities of (filmic) narrative and sequentiality, his work is reflecting on the position of painting itself, in an era in which the overflow of imagery produced by film and television is almost inescapable. Film is unmistakenly one of Stuhmer's main influences: Little Triggers is almost entirely based on the American '60s Cold-War-paranoia-classic The Manchurian Candidate by John Frankenheimer. A fight scene from this film -the first martial arts scene in a Hollywood movie- is cut up and translated into a series of 9 still paintings, in which the artist deconstructs the sequence, and zooms in on the gestures, poses and gazes that are typical for film renderings of a fistfight between two men. In this series, Stuhmer refers to the codes of film and television by formal means as well (the black edges characteristic of a 9:16 format, a television screen with VCR), and the paintings function as screen, times 2 - the representation is doubled. Frozen in time, freeze-framed, the film characters' subtle gestures and poses (the lighting of a cigarette, for example) obtain an even stronger associative meaning. Stuhmer paints with the eye of a director or editor, and with Little Triggers he reveals himself as a born storyteller and sharp observer who, by deconstructing and reconstructing existing visual-narrative information, creates a layered framework by interweaving notions like memory and recognition, political history, personal recollection, and painterly vision.
[Xander Karskens]
