TETRIS, 2019, oil on canvas, 270 x 175 cm
The artist looks out of his corner, stands on his familiar position and understands the world from the window of his perspective. From this point everything is double-faced, there are no one-sided truths: Each statement meets its opposite. In Moritz Schleime's works, the paralyzing resignation of a lonely person meets the accelerated loudness of vibrant masses, a dreary colorlessness with exuberant festivity, posthuman monster creatures with human emotions.
The form of his expression is also closely linked to this system of ambivalence: His style cannot be assigned to either Expressionism or Surrealism, nor to Dada or Realism. Schleime's pictorial language rather plays by its own rules; its only constant is transformation in its instability and youthful insecurity.
The permanent movement and dynamics in his works allow us to pass through spaces and perceive them in the process of change: In front of us grapes the provocative, impersonal distance between the identity-seeking protagonists. We look at the apparent contradiction between civilization and wilderness, between culture and nature. The fields of tension of space and time between life and decay, ecstasy and degeneration, birth and destruction are superimposed.
Schleime's rebellious disrespect for traditional styles and conventional categories is evident in his infiltration of the masses' enthusiastic American-Western pop culture. Icons like Michael Jackson are symbols of an over-stimulated, masked and anxious generation in its assimilated and never-ending adolescence. A poisonous mixture of the unprotected interior of the media-soaked private sphere and the personal presentation in the social environment, the social exterior.
His art is not pleasing. It is attention-grabbing, rousing, aggressive. It can do a lot, but not one thing: leave the viewer untouched in his corner.