ALEXANDER SKATS
THE BALLADIST

18 March - 23 April, 2023


For The Balladist, his first solo exhibition at Galleri Thomas Wallner, Alexander Skats created a group of new paintings that offer a broad overview of his work, while at the same time displaying a painterly development towards more detailed depictions and new approaches to colour choice.

Driven by a profound fascination for the endless flood of images of the digital age, Skats combines imagery and references from art history, classic films and literature with motives from his personal life, connecting them through his unique, highly recognizable painterly style. In his latest works, he elaborates on his treatment of the individual pictorial elements, abandoning broad brushstrokes in favour of more detailed surfaces and strong, clearly defined lines.

The Balladist, which gives the exhibition its title, demonstrates Skats' ability to use art historical references while simultaneously achieving a strangely contemporary aesthetic expression. When assembling the works for the exhibition, Skats imagined The Balladist as a kind of storyteller in the tradition of 14th century poets like Geoffrey Chaucer or Boccaccio; an omniscient narrator who knows and tells the stories of all the characters in the exhibition. Skats depicts the figure as a cross between a renaissance angel and 20th century singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar and places it in front of a curtain as if to mark the overture to a theatrical performance.

Morning Dew, on the other hand, draws from a completely different set of references: with its mysteriously radiant colours against a shadowy dark background, the painting evokes associations with a baroque still life as well as with Mapplethorpe’s sexualized, almost obscene flower photographs.

A recurring element of the works in the exhibition is the depiction of figures with closed eyes. Alexander Skats presents the subjects of his portraits in moments of private, radical vulnerability. Ballerina, inspired by the movie The Red Shoes (1948) based on H.C. Andersen’s story of the same name, depicts a female dancer seemingly unable to decide what her next move will be; a metaphor for a state of creative crisis or failure. Variations on the theme of desire, pain and pain as integral parts of artistic creation run through the exhibition.

In this context, the few figures that look directly back at the viewer stand out even more. A naked female figure against a monochrome background, whose confident, bold stare challenges the observers and confronts them with their own voyeurism, can be read as a reference to Manet's Olympia (1863-65). She embodies the artis model’s refusal to submit and represents a counterweight to the power imbalance inherent in the dynamics of artistic subject matter and observer.