London-based German artist Roman Liška’s exhibition “NU BALANCE” was a statement of dissatisfaction and an expression of desire. The show was conceived not only as a group of works, but as an extended debate; each week the works on view were replaced with a new group, providing a shifting context and stimulus for discussion. Liška’s fundamental question was this: If the social status quo is under threat from financial, political, and environmental pressures, how might we reconfigure things in order to establish a new, dynamic equilibrium? Included in the first week’s hang was the eponymous NU BALANCE (moodboard) (all works 2012), which provided a sort of index to the show’s concerns. NU BALANCE is a print with a ground richly textured by incisions, impressions, overlays, letter fragments, diagrams, and other marks. Sprayed spots and threads of white speckle and slide across the gray ground, decorating and infecting the work’s already dense surface with a paradoxically cheerful viral menace. As much as a poster collage advertising itself as “art,” the piece is a well-used drawing board, a map, a satellite photograph, an archaeological record, a cloud chamber particle trace, and a bomb-pattern analysis.

Liška is a painter, yet none of the works on display conformed to the conventions of the medium. Their material contrasts of flashy and tony, durable and disposable, combined with their pervasive shininess and reflection, cast a skeptical light on the nature of painting as a discipline, the economic status of the objects produced in its name, and the conditions within which they are viewed and consumed. Drenched in knowing allusions to modern and contemporary art and visual culture, the works proclaim acceptance of their commodity status at the same time that their layered surfaces resist any interpretative purchase. A distinctive pink page from the Financial Times sits in the crease of the mirrored Lucite sheet of A Day in Dystopia (Phillips de Pury/Basquiat). Screenprinted with a dazzle camouflage pattern, the Lucite lies slumped between floor and wall: Richard Serra meets Sarah Lucas somewhere between Helmand, Afghanistan, and Wall Street, laughing all the while at any pitiful effort to construct meaning out of such paltry references. It seems that the issue for Liška is to determine how a painter such as himself can operate today without seeing his efforts wholly co-opted by the market. Though already often addressed, this issue has become newly urgent in the wake of the financial crisis—to whose effects and implications some still remain impervious.

How much has really changed when, as Liška reminds us, the weekend edition of the FT can still carry a magazine insert titled How to Spend It? Liška’s work Life After Wall Street (How to Spend It series) is an enlarged Xerox reproduction of a digital photograph of another of her pieces pasted directly onto the wall. To the middle of this image is screwed a TV bracket, on which is mounted a rectangular panel wrapped in various layers of sprayed and printed fabric and covered in a synthetic mesh. While there’s almost a tie-dye, countercultural feel to its bright green and orange patterning, in formal terms the panel is a screen, pumping CNN or Bloomberg stats or Al Jazeera or whatever out at us. It’s set at an angle to the wall behind, so some part of the arrangement—the Xerox or the panel—is always being viewed obliquely. The act of viewing is further disturbed by a number of irregularly distributed metal eyelets, which disrupt the synthetic mesh. One’s eye is brought back to the surface not in order to see the image there, but rather to recognize the screen, with its glitches and visual noise, as a medium, a process, and a carrier: the only place where we’re likely to discover any depth.

—Michael Archer