theOMENmag 02

Michael Maier Barcelona www.m-a-i-e-r.com

By Jorge Socarras Barcelona has a long history as an avant-garde artistic center, and continues attracting artists from the world over, as well as cultivating its own. Michael Maier came to Barcelona 10 years ago from Germany and made it his home, though he does not consider himself a “Barcelona artist” per se. His work itself would be hard to place, as it embodies so many stylistic elements, arguably making it all the more “Barcelonan.” Taken outside of geographical context, Maier’s digital paintings perhaps find their most apt locus on the Internet, where he has found a broad international following.

I myself was first captivated by his images long-distance via facebook, their sensorial colorfulness and playful primitivism quite striking even on a pocket screen. Zooming in closer reveals a sophisticated harmony of figurative and abstract elements, the effect at once visceral and cerebral. Initial comparison to Jean-Michel Basquiat seems inevitable, but further contemplation conjures up aspects of Paul Klee, Wifredo Lam, Matta, or even Barcelona’s own Antoni Tàpies—all re-imagined for the digital age.

Often wry and provocative as their titles suggest, Maier’s images nonetheless maintain an organic beauty and formalism. In “Green Boy” the pictorial space seems roughly split into four areas, all monochrome green with black overlines, each depicting an aspect of a male subject, and vacillating between eroticizing and deconstructing him.

In the upper right quadrant, tense, nervous lines highlight the mans chest in bra-like fashion, verging on becoming a pair of voyeuristic eyes, while from the upper left, a young Adonis looks on as if dissecting his own beauty and maleness. It would seem Maier is updating the pagan fertility symbol of the green man, at the same time scrutinizing it under the homoerotic gaze.

“Her Lipstick Will Kill You” presents the viewer with a more abstracted, less literal mélange of colliding and overlapping fragments, planes and layers, colors and scrawls. The effect is one of images on the verge of appearing or possibly having already decayed. The word “she” may be the only decipherable scrawl, and it lends the rest of the imagery the implication of a third-person-feminine – unseen, like the lipstick - a presence that defies the objectifying male eye/I. Has objective imagery been rendered subjective experience?

Despite these psychosexual connotations, Maier insists that his work has no meaning, and that mentally interpreting it is useless. Rather than interpreting any external reality, he says that “he is obsessed with deconstructing the images and language of his fragmented inner world,” and that his work refers to “his own hermetic universe of symbols.” While perhaps its resonance could be partly attributable to the collective unconscious, Maier himself avoids placing his work in any theoretical context. Unabashedly open about his own sexual identity as a gay man, he denies this being a paramount factor in his work, but concedes there being gay elements in it.