Walking through his latest exhibition, “Life,” which opens at Metro Pictures in New York on Thursday night, Olaf Breuning evinces the neutrality that his native Switzerland is famous for. There are things he likes (absurdity, good friends) and things he doesn’t like (market-darling crapstraction) — but he is reluctant to condemn. In accordance with which, while his new show purports to be a mirror of our contemporary world, with all its digital distractions, Breuning makes it clear that he’s not bemoaning the status quo. He is, for instance, a fan of Instagram, which he uses mostly to post pictures of food that he’s eaten, rearranged into face shapes. And although he is a bit concerned that “someone like Nietzsche wouldn’t exist today” — his sort of narrow, cerebral focus being hopelessly out of date — Breuning seems reconciled to the way we currently live. It’s that life, with all its muddle, confusion, joy, and detritus, that he represents here, through 25 photo-collages printed on enormous, ovaloid surfaces. Visitors navigate the space, necessarily a bit disoriented; here and there a few head-shaped, mirrored sculptures (representing Breuning himself, or “the human,” in a more universal sense) reflect the densely colorful and confounding compositions.The subject of most of these pieces is the artist’s social network: more than 100 subjects, including the Metro Pictures staff, his wife, writers (Gideon Lewis-Krauss, wearing a baseball cap bearing the slogan “Think Until You Stink”), and fellow artists (Oliver Klegg, sporting an outfit composed of champagne bottles). The portraits were captured in Breuning’s East Village studio over the course of two months. Friends or otherwise, the artist still calls the shots. “My models know that they’re just canvases I use to paint on,” he says, quite literally for some of them. “It’s not that I want to find their personality.” Nevertheless, he does costume certain subjects with a wink at who they are as people — he points in particular to a middle-aged man, a hardcore vegan, whom he posed holding a large inflatable hot dog.With this exhibition, Breuning says, he wanted to get back to “simple communication,” something that “a common person without art-historical knowledge could get a kick out of.” That is not to say that the work isn’t strewn with insider references. One photograph of a man glumly pondering his life beneath a precarious tower of common objects is an allusion to Swiss duo Fischli/Weiss; another, picturing a columnlike sculpture of heads with blank Post-Its screwed into them, nods to Brancusi. In a passage between two galleries, Breuning has hung a dauntingly large image of a woman’s buttocks with snippets of a text message conversation issuing from its crack (“Bananas? Wow, thank u so much!!!! did you had fun last night? Whaterver you think”). That one, the artist explains, is an homage to Marina Abramovic’s 1977 “Imponderabilia,” which forced visitors to walk between two naked actors blocking a doorway.Breuning has previously waxed self-deprecatory, extolling the virtues of “stupidity” in his work, by which I think he means joy, free-associative chaos, and a very marked lack of pretentiousness. (This is a man who excitedly explained how a moment of creative block was solved by looking down at the salad he was eating, photographing it, and repurposing it as the composition’s background.) He’s bored by most of what Chelsea has to offer: either “market-oriented art,” like the vibrant abstractions a few chimps are creating in one of the works on view here, or “very reduced, superminimal, intellectual art.” He offers a kind of antidote to these, pieces that you are indeed unlikely to encounter in the neighborhood this month: poop-head emojis, women with plungers affixed to their faces, depictions of the Internet as giant trash buckets laden with photographs of total strangers, commentaries on human evolution that incorporate potatoes and a vintage coffee machine, robot-men built from fake Chinese iPhones. Whatever you do, check your self-seriousness at the door. “This one is the dance of life,” says Breuning, standing in front of a photograph that may or may not be in perverse conversation with Matisse. “It’s about boobs, sausages, and the world.”
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