Dennis Loesch was born in Salzburg, Austria, in 1979 and studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. For seven years, he has been producing copies of the life around him by arranging evening screenings of “filmed films” (films of artists’ films) and “clubbed clubs” (restaged club nights of the past). Loesch’s current exhibition, “numerous,” is completely self-referential and—as a negation of the concrete—pure Matrix. Using Photoshop, the artist has developed a “digital brushstroke” from the letters of his name. Multiplied and variously arranged, this stroke yields black shapes and numbers that are printed one on top of the other on white paper, canvases, and oblong fabric objects. Together, the printed figures make up the opening date of the exhibition: 11.01.2008.
The scenario Loesch has created here is art in an artificial space without context and without life. Numbers are abstract symbols for abstract relationships, yet they negate any form of “expressiveness.” On the one hand, multiplying your own name represents a total abstraction of the individual; on the other, it asserts a full claim to authorship. Either way, the gesture is almost autistic in its self-centeredness. One inevitably thinks of the character Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, in the film The Shining—a writer who, driven insane by his need to create a great work of art, can produce only one sentence, repeated: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
More a symptom of an art world revolving entirely around itself than a player in that world, this young artist seems to be sprinting down the homestretch of a race whose goal is to finish before actually beginning—he represents the obliteration of one’s own existence through the medium of repetition, the copy without the original. Exit artist.
Translated from German by Jane Brodie.
