B-Part Exhibition
Images of Architecture #2
Roland Boden
Verheißung im Gelände
The sky is grey, the ground is arid, no living being can be seen. It is only man-made architecture, structures conceived by him, that assert their place in the dystopian-looking oil paintings as if in a lost position. In their timelessness, the pictures with such trend-setting titles as "Abend aller Tage" or "Babylon Konstrukt" raise questions of a present full of open emotional states.
The artist Roland Boden (*1962 in Dresden), who lives in Berlin, shows these and other pictures with memorable, surreal-dark architectural scenarios under the title "Promise in the Field" at B-Part Exhibition. His End Time Landscapes form the second part of the new exhibition series Images of Architecture by B-Part Exhibition.
The possible attribution of the motifs as testimonies of an end time does not necessarily refer to the end of all time, but in particular to that of a certain epoch, which we know as modernity. In this sense, one finds in the artist's paintings rather inner landscapes, ruins of certain mental concepts, certain ideologies - was this the Dutch pavilion at EXPO 2000? Are there, for instance, assembled remnants of Centrum department stores? - as their real built forms of expression. Possibly they are just pictures of discarded models in a storeroom, while the world outside the door continues blindingly, promising further terrain?
Information on this can be found in the way the pictures were created: They were drawn upon computer-generated architectural 3D models. These are based on motifs from an extensive collection of photographs that the artist has taken himself; in addition, there is material from computer games or film stills. Transferred into the analogue medium of painting, worlds emerge in which what is model, what is simulation and what is reality consciously remains ambivalent.
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