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Convulsive Viewing
Emil Holmer's work always packs an unexpected punch; it is direct, immediate and affects us on a physical level.
His recent paintings propose images that enter our bodies through unexpected orifices, using unexpected devices. Gaping assholes, mouths -screaming or choking-, wide-eyed stares and flaring nostrils enrapture the viewer's gaze and aided by a daggered piece of iron, an axe or a whetted knife, prise her open, leaving her gutted and convulsed.
Each work forces us into a position of defence, yet denies us any chance to define an enemy. Troops of sharpened implements are pointed forebodingly at us from all sides like bayonets. Nearly every element functions as punctum, puncturing our visual field and scaring our mind with unavoidable afterimages.
Reminiscent of a Surrealist canvas, his work is an image-symphony of dangerous elements in uncanny poses. Our gaze is dazzled by the plethora of different objects. The too-muchness, inherent in every depicted scene almost creates a blur that, straining the viewer's eyes evokes pupil-dilation: a sexualisation of the gaze.
Like Freud's primal scene -the act of copulation performed by our parents that we have all (supposedly) witnessed- the viscerality of what is seen breeches our defence mechanism and forces us into a libidinally undischarged state. The image holds us in its sway. In a moment of astonishment, wonderment and awe, we are thrown back upon ourselves and double over.
Generally, we recover from such moving encounters by seeking refuge; we try to find security in 'the known'. Already the expression -without achieving any results- of our drive to understand, to figure out and to know makes us feel safe.
It is a trajectory initiated by our unavoidable erotic drive, the drive that incessantly 'yearns for', 'ascends to' and which governs our striving towards understanding.
While the faculty of understanding necessitates representation, a re-presentation of the images Holmer proposes is incommensurable with their visceral content. We do not want to re-call them, but we feel an almost voyeuristic compulsion to look and ultimately we become attracted by the unmediated rawness.
Fittingly, Holmer's most recent work is inspired by the palpable unease that constitutes the atmosphere of porn video stores. These spaces, often seedy backrooms or badly ventilated cellar units, function as displaced and repressed areas in our society's collective consciousness. Here the atmosphere smells of the sweat evoked by the stress of an inner conflict where our 'lowbrow' voyeuristic tendency is at stake; the same sweat that lingers at newsstands, where our gaze is almost automatically drawn to the top shelf.
Similarly, our eyes are riveted to these canvases, which, without overtly paying lip service substantiate André Breton's dictum that beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.
David Ulrichs (art critic)
From the exhibition catalogue for "Inland Empire", Kristiansand Kunstforening, Norway.
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Future Painting
Nearly impossible, it seems, not to think of an aesthetic Big Bang when confronted with the work of Emil Holmer: Every painting a hysterical compound of fluorescent colors, anarchic forms and flashing letters. Pitch black nil, glaring green, bleeding pink, austere charcoal drawing. It’s a gigantic sea of old and new signs, amoebae and smilies, camp fires and hidden porno-collage. In the midst of all this, a big primal crate, a prehistoric incubator in which sharp pickaxes and other raw ideas breed.
But Holmer is no primitive, nor is he a romantic. Holmer is an artist who presents his quest for an original language in distinctly mechanical terms. There is no picture, no primordial soup without concepts and commands lifted from the world of programmed apparati: „ERASSEHEADD“, „ERASE“, „EMPTY“, „FILL“. In this light, each work seems to be the product of a simulation – a cognitive labor obsessed with a reality designed for endless repetition and determined to work through and beyond its mental confines. The takeoff point for this delirious adventure is the lower edge of the picture, where self-replicating words run across the image as if transmitted by an LED or a teleprompter:
„ERASEFILLEMPTYERASEFILLEMPTY“. Hovering above this mechanized realm is the formless fantasy of an archaic future that is both exhilarating and terrifying in its still indeterminate state.
The difficulty of imagining the future is the difficulty of imagining the disappareance of the present world. The question is then how to jump-start a mental process that might lead to real change, to difference, to otherness? Holmer has a method: In the absence of a concept of the future, he focuses on a single erosive tendency in our current lives, one that he isolates and expands until the tendency itself becomes apocalyptic and explodes the reality in which we are trapped. It is the repetitive and mechanical insistence of the teleprompter – the language of sameness and standardization – that forms the hysterically colored battering ram of a new time and future. Still, every breakthrough is a potential breakdown. In the end, the signs point to moments of relief, liberation and euphoria as much as to fantasies of deterioration and self-effacement: „SLOW PUNCTURE“.
Holmer’s artistic practice operates between the poles of two aesthetic traditions that the history of modern painting tends to think of as adversaries. While playing with a ready-made language dressed up in street graffiti style, he simultaneously mobilizes a painterly rhetoric that is decisively subjective and abstract. And as he follows an artistic tradition that, spanning Surrealism, Pop Art and today's avant-garde, seeks to reproduce and illustrate certain mechanical conditions of production, he also practices a form of expressionist painting that, since its advent in the early 20th century, has been linked to the concept of a self-determined subject. The relevance of Holmer’s painting is located in the way it aligns the here and now with the aesthetic past, how it simulates the end of the world while simultaneously breaking through into a future – and thus delivering a method for renovating the present.
Iris Mickein
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