Tjorg Douglas Beer

Banda Municipal presents Automation/Sinfonie by Tjorg Douglas Beer.

Beer's artistic practice is a means of making sense of the world, putting it in order, and communicating it. His work is influenced by everyday life, politics, literature, and music. At the beginning of his pictorial production, he created banner-like collages on plastic tarps, works closer to the desire to tell a story. Now, in his most recent work, the artist makes a conceptual decision: to completely distance himself from narrative elements and connect with painting in a freer way. To achieve this, Beer uses stencils and disposable materials such as coffee capsules, headphone wrappers, and records, with which he begins to paint under an automatic action. The use of stencils allows him to replicate patterns and structures, as well as generate superimpositions on the canvas. The constant execution of pattern use, when combined with different materials such as aerosol, acrylics, and oils, creates a kind of visual dissonance similar to 1980s computer game graphics and the sampling process in music. Each painting is a composition of visual noises. In addition to paintings, four new bronze sculptures are a central part of the exhibition. Beer uses plastic objects that he assembles to form sculptural figures that he casts in bronze. Resources such as water bottles, promotional lighters from convenience stores, toys like Barbie or Transformers, antidepressant pill containers, and vitamin jars are all objects that, for the artist, configure dystopian materials of contemporaneity. Beer assembles these dystopian materials to create a utopian statue in a sacred position, a column, and a mask.

The title of the exhibition AUTOMATON/SINFONIE is ambivalent. On one hand, it refers to Beer's painting process: a kind of analog automation that begins with simplified figures (reminiscent of ancient robots) and evolves into the final phase of the pieces. All the paintings are named with combinations of letters and numbers, in the manner of inventory codes. Additionally, when the works are exhibited consecutively –along with their titles– they form a sequence that evokes a musical score. The title also addresses the artist's reflection on new technological developments.

–Banda Municipal