Matthias Groebel’s Monuments to Uncertain Memories

I swear I have seen the woman in Matthias Groebel’s painting Untitled (069) before. Her downcast eyes gaze from under hooded lids to a point beyond the compositional frame; the skin on her face is starkly illuminated by harsh flashlight from a camera held a little too close. The woman looks troubled and fatigued; some unspoken disaster hangs about her trembling lips. Something has happened, and she has decided to address it in public.

The azure scarf she wears to cover her head marks her as a woman of faith, but Groebel otherwise depicts her in an unmarked room in a nameless place. Undoubtedly, however, the source image for this painting has come from a television screen: the oversaturated colours and the flickering whites of the walls produce a texture that could only ever stem from analogue moving image. This is further asserted by the italicized font in the lower right-hand corner, which spells out the word ‘research’. The appearance of the word locates the woman in an archive not of portraiture, but of footage. I swear I have seen that woman before. Or perhaps it was someone else, from some other show, on some other channel.

Groebel’s canvases are monuments to uncertain media memories. They are the embodiment of in media res, with the artist offering no precursory context, instead relying solely on the narrative potential of the images themselves. Approximately the size of old-fashioned television monitors, Groebel’s paintings from the 1990s pair found images with words applied to the canvas in a font that is instantly evocative of television: their juxtaposition produces a disquieting cognitive dissonance in which we scramble, and fail, to decode images that are most vividly marked by their hyper-familiarity.

But familiarity to what, exactly? Groebel reminds us – reminds me – of hours spent sitting too close to the television screen as a kid, watching disasters unfold in languages unknown. Satellite television revolutionized media consumption in the 1980s by ushering in an era of constantly flowing imagery from far-flung places, which was consumed indiscriminately, excessively, with little resistance or criticality. Emerging right before the internet became widespread, satellite built the phantasmagorical structures of perception dominant in today’s TikTok age. I would like to think that little has changed since then for Groebel, whose works speak to a single, pressing point: when any flow of moving images is arrested, as in a painting, their meaning dissipates and erodes, pushing us into media’s uncanny valley, where images are nothing without their signals.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 245 with the headline ‘Media Memories’

Matthias Groebel is included in ‘Pansori, a soundscape of the 21st century’, 15th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, September 9 – December 1

^{Main image: Matthias Groebel, Untitled (069) (detail), 1996, acrylic on canvas, 95 × 95 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Ulrik, New York; photograph: Stephen Faught}