Time of Monsters

“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
Antonio Gramsci

It’s the time of monsters, time for atrocities, imminent danger, as the title of Merlin Reichart’s solo exhibition at Galerie Oel-Früh suggests. Is this a prophecy, a dark omen, an invitation?

Merlin Reichart’s installative settings feed on immediate physical and sensory experiences and are nourished by the current pulse of time. Anticipating the political and social upheavals of our time, he traces the impending tremors like a seismograph. In doing so, he integrates the viewer into situational spaces, obliges his audience to behaviours, provokes action and reaction.
This is no different here in Time of Monsters, an exhibition whose narrative unfolds in the spatial and contextual tension between two elements.

On the one side, a frieze of human handprints, fossilised in a black compound. Traces of a future in the making. Formally, these reliefs appear to result from archaeological excavations and indicate a bygone human existence. They originate from our bodies, which only show presence in their negative form. They point to a time after the Anthropocene, after the climate catastrophe, a time after humankind’s domination of the planet and the exploitation of its resources. 
The inspiration for these fossils of the future came from glue traces of protest actions by the activist group ‘’Letzte Generation‘’. To whom they ultimately belong, it doesn’t matter; what they show, decay; what they say, it’s done, game over.

This fragility is massively juxtaposed with an archaic battering ram from times long past, a siege weapon, pure Middle Ages, simple, brutal, brachial.
Embedded in a small shed made of burnt wood, an almost unbearable tension builds up, a potential energy that suddenly discharges, unleashing a cycle of built-up violence. Endlessly, always boiling on, mechanically, the same strategy, the same blunt result. Unstoppable, in unsteady intervals, the choreography of a battle whose goal and outcome remain open, an endurance test.
Home Sweet Home is written on it in kitschy curved letters. It conveys something homely, beautifully frozen in familiarity, a cosy feeling of self-sufficiency, an illusion. There is a bastion against anything that does not fit into one’s own traditional concept, against any change, a protection; and at the same time the epitome of destruction.

Listen carefully, hear the harbingers that threaten structures everywhere. That tease them off their hinges, one attack after the next. Is there a feeling of fear creeping in?
We feel we are living in a time of drifting apart, full of upheavals that threaten to break us open. Social cohesion and empathy are increasingly giving way to sensitivities. The feeling of living in a deeply divided society, exhausted by ideological battles, which is simply no longer able to endure discourse and complexities, stretched to a bursting point.

Time of Monsters sensitises us to the emotional state of a society that is (mis) led by fear and emotions; it demands mindfulness, a real sense of resilience, resisting initial impulses and the insistence on one’s own truth. It is essential to build up resilience, to not just tolerate reactionary and destructive forces, to focus and to arm oneself against phobias.

Can you hear the monsters calling?

Sven Christian Schuch