A convenient World Clock

We are stumbling through Sathit Sattarasart’s mechanically produced monument-like human beings on the gallery windows, into a minty fog that enshrouds Lars Karl Becker's large scale drawings. The realm, behind the glass, consists of these all too familiar weirdos bluntly extracted from its respective book pages. An unofficial intercompany crossover where Richard Scarry's Lowly Worm encounters more sinister, to downright evil characters, the very german TKKG gang; A group of youth detectives relying on racial profiling and victim blaming as investigation methods. Nowadays, most right-wing politicians would be proud of them; but at the time of their creation in the 1980s, they were only the most common detective stories for kids. 

Becker’s Gauloises depicts a collapsing universe in a toothpaste color palette. Two different worlds are now ought to share the same Earth. The everlasting conflict between false promises of a cute anarchic world consisting of easily functioning grown ups, and a rigid social regime to look forward to becoming a ruling part of it is now locked into a stalemate. In this exhibition, there is literally no other way to look through Becker's post-pedagogic psychedelia than through Sattarasart’s prescribed eyeglasses of his schematic drawing Therapy with props. Mounted on the storefront window of the exhibition space with a necessary assertiveness, it is not a key to the work; but rather a citadel in an intellectual battlefield.

Both artists are united in a silent scream: »Stop educating!«. No wonder they are equally scared and fascinated by the sight of monkeys sitting by mountain roads; fiercely looking at them passing by in a car— all of them simply waiting to attack, if a window is rolled down. They already have been poisoned by society too. Depictions of strange motions on the floor are at the heart of Sattarasart’s surreal remix of a classic Gustave Courbet painting. An all too obvious glitch in reality-reproduction: All tools of the craftsman have been swapped for pineapples; Social realism going slapstick—or at least weirdly locked up to our analytical grown up minds. 

There never has been a state of nature in the first place, nor a realistic option for a different world in law and order; accepting this stance, Becker's distillation of intellectual poison fed to us as children seems just like another attempt to find an alchemical cure for pedagogies that have been applied to us. Civilization is a nightmare for any individual. Sattharasart short-circuited the idea of social realism in art violently, goodbye Paris Commune. The only thing we can be sure about: we’re still welcome to enjoy the cold comfort of culture; and even more important, to get a bit tipsy at the fireplace.

(Text by: Seth Gastrell)