Matthias Groebel sees the world through screens

By the late 1980s, satellite television was in most European households, including the Cologne home of artist Matthias Groebel. Back then, television screens produced fuzzy images with scan lines, unlike today’s crisp and high-definition LCD and OLED displays. “At the time, the only way television images could become visible was under the glass of a cathode ray tube,” Matthias tells me. The CTRs (current transfer ratios) would emit electronic signals that were manipulated to display images on the screen, which induced a trance-like state if you looked too closely and for too long.

Groebel started transferring television images onto the canvas in 1988. “I would record footage from obscure channels that I’d flick through late at night,” says the artist, whose television paintings capture fleeting close-ups of unfamiliar faces, some with English or Mandarin subtitles. Others move through otherworldly colours, echoing the highly saturated first decades of colour television. “I had a rule not to use images that people would recognise. No politicians. No well-known actors. No soap opera celebrities.”

What is recognisable is the grainy fuzz and blurry sheen recalling the analogue quality of now ‘vintage’ box TVs. Using frame grabbing technology, Groebel translates the static noise of the television directly onto the canvas. He uses a machine he created to apply each pigment of acrylic paint, giving him a high degree of control and precision. Assisted by the machine, he transfers the image from the screen directly onto the canvas – untainted and unfiltered by other variables that might have otherwise stood in between. “I wanted a clean path from the electronic signal to the canvas,” he says.

Groebel’s machine applies one colour at a time, adhering to the artist’s commands. His process resembles that of a traditional painter, selecting and mixing the right colours and establishing composition for his canvas – the only difference is the controlled assistance of his machine. “This is painting and not printing,” he emphasises.

Groebel’s practice captures the rapid technological advances that he has lived through. The images used in his early 2000s Hacked Channels were taken from encrypted channels that he decoded using illegal software downloaded from the Internet. Failing to fully restore the images, the software would create alternate and abstracted images detached from reality that Groebel would transfer onto the canvas. The indecipherable and pixelated compositions leave us waiting in the hope that if we stare at them long enough, we will be able to decode them. Once digital encryption replaced the older and less secure analogue encryption, Groebel could no longer break through the images. “There were no chimaeras left to decode anymore,” he reflects.

Groebel turned to real life to find the chimaeras beyond the screens. In 2003, he visited London and was instantly struck by Tower House, a seven-storey brick building in Whitechapel built in 1902 to provide cheap accommodation for workers. “The abandoned building seemed to protrude physically out of some dark past into the present,” he recalls. Between 2003 and 2006, Groebel filmed hours of footage of the domineering red brick structure covered in scaffolding as it waited to be converted into upmarket flats. Through stereography, Groebel enhances the real-life depth of the building into the two-dimensional plane of his tower house canvases currently on display at Gathering gallery in London. Though without the aid of a stereoscopic viewer, the paintings remain as 2Dl images, falling short of mimicking the natural process of human eyesight. Tower House and the graffiti on its walls are doubled on Groebel’s’ canvases, the figures repeating their walks within the same frame. “The information of the third dimension stays invisible,” he says. The building and the people in his paintings are in two places at the same time, like phantoms with no material or physical existence.

Groebel’s paintings become markers of a different time, echoes of yesterday’s technologies which are constantly being replaced by rapid innovations. He makes us aware of our position in this ever-changing world. “Including a machine into the process of painting is a logical move for an artist in our world that is flooded with images,” he says. “Sometimes I wish I could control the outcome of the machine better – but every once in a while I get a result I did not expect, and I guess, that’s worth the trouble.”