Elias Saile

Liebe Auch

10 May – 21 June 2024

Youth instinctively understands the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth 1

Things drift in and out of view. They won’t get caught—not because they’re hiding, but because they are constituted that way. Elias Saile’s paintings are informed by a parallel momentum: shaped as much by memory as by media, and thus by fleetingness and specificity. In these works, digital and analogue influences lie not in opposition, but are part of the same spiral, mimicking one another, trading places gently.

Even with great effort and intention, there is no clean way to separate perception from what is already consumed. Something will always have latched on—consciously or not.

When I look at them in a chat window on my desktop, these paintings remind me of you and blur with flashbacks. You read, we talk, you raise your arms while getting dressed, I sleep; gentle graphite lines draw our outlines, heavier oil paint fragments our blankets into mosaics of color, embedding us in a landscape that forms an architectonic backdrop—showing how one moves through a sharp-edged world in a young body. Our hair and skin are drawn softly, but that makes us feel the impact even harder when we bump into the spiky background.

Contradiction delineates these paintings. The figures in Saile’s work emerge as references bubbling up through his coming of age amidst online pop culture, from a context shaped by contemporary digital image production and circulation, but their material reaches back (and forth) toward the classical.

When you can’t distinguish anymore between the memory of a painting you’ve seen at a show and the picture you took to show it to friends—or whatever followers you might have. Maybe you don’t even want to share it but just let it stay on your phone. The screen, the photo, the apparatus has become an integral part of that memory, adding an additional layer of mediation.

Saile’s paintings convey, subtly through their skin, this feeling of digital fragmentation felt in an analogue body. They exist not in denial but in solid, perpetual mimesis. The book is the extension of the eye; the canvas is the extension of the screen as the extension of the eye—completely and openly affected by what has preceded it.

Then memory expands and takes into it the medium’s sensual layers and afterglow—some more, some less. Our incredibly slick displays seem to merge more softly with our experience of the world. Being part of any specific generation shapes the way we approach this kind of blend between the technical and memory.

The interference of the references Saile brings into his paintings is so subtle it can’t be immediately traced back to its origin on screens—for us as well as for the artist. What remains is an unconscious texture, curiosity, and affect.

Rule-breaking happens here too, but quietly. Not to be seen—just to be felt later. It slips past authority by never announcing itself. Just not getting caught. Saile’s works aren’t trying to distance themselves from their references rooted in pop culture, like music videos or comic characters. Neither are they nostalgic. There’s no curtain of irony, no slick detachment. They let references in—tenderly, sometimes without knowing where they’re from, but letting them into the here and now, allowing for a flexibility within their past and present. Everything gets in. The paintings become a way of sneaking off—not toward something, just away.

Hanne Kaunicnik

1 (McLuhan & Fiore, 2008)