Discover the Enigmatic Stories of Marco Schuler’s “Go! Go! Go!” Exhibition at the Kunsthalle Darmstadt

The string game is hopelessly tangled. No wonder. Filigree figures are difficult to tie over your head, with short arms and sausage fingers. The creature, which pushes its brown spherical head halfway over the lower edge of the picture, tried anyway. This is what the red yarn now looks like: a ball of yarn that can hardly be unraveled.

Marco Schuler’s comic-like, simplified representation of this moon face is initially reminiscent of the work of a child. However, the almost one and a half meter high and two meter wide format speaks against it. The technology is also more complex than it first appears. Many layers of oil, varnish and acrylic give the motif depth. The fantasy figure surrounded by orange floats in front of a dark universe in which reddish Milky Ways, yellow nebulae, small suns, comets and stars appear.

Of course, no one would think that the motif had a model in Christian iconography. And only those in the know understand that the title of the picture, “Knotlooser” refers to a rare type of Marian portrait: “Maria knotlooser” dominates a miraculous image created by Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner around 1700 in the Augsburg pilgrimage church of Sankt Peter am Perlach. The crescent moon Madonna featured there unravels a tangled white ribbon, symbolizing the abolition of the Fall.

In the end it succeeds

In contrast, the contemporary “Knot Solver” is just one of almost 200 stylistically similar pictures with which Marco Schuler presented the Kunsthalle Darmstadt just wallpapered. They leave no doubt that the artist, who trained as a sculptor under Olaf Metzel at the Munich Academy, has shifted his focus to painting in recent years. “Go! Go! Go!” exclaims the title of the exhibition, which summarizes the development of the artist, who was born in Bühl in Baden in 1972, over the past two decades, and at the same time names the dynamics inscribed above all in his paintings.

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Most of the time one sees cheerful bright colors, friendly cephalopods and other fantasy figures as well as a spontaneous painting style reminiscent of graffiti. The enigmatic stories that the pictures tell also contain serious moments, often inspired by Catholic mysticism. A “Christ Child” tumbling through space, titles such as “Albtraum”, “last day in paradise” and even more so the figure of Death leaning like a pair of scales bear witness to this. A connection to tradition and the genre of landscape painting also reveals a comparatively realistic depiction of Schuler’s living space in Markgräflerland.

Floor sculptures cast from aluminium, but appearing stony and placed in front of the paintings like guardian figures, refer to his sculptural roots. They are also characterized by a superficial childlike simplicity, which at times refers too clearly to Alberto Giacometti’s formal language. Steel sculptures in front of the entrance that are taller than a man and painted brightly colored appear even more reduced: the symmetrical form of Schuler’s most recent works follows the same principle as a silhouette made from folded paper.

Even the earliest videos were intended to be sculptural and not performative. The useless situations in which he filmed himself remind one of Bruce Nauman here and there. With the difference that a supposedly hopeless endeavor like trying to get dressed in wind force 120, with muscles and teeth, succeeds in the end.

Go! Go! Go! in the Kunsthalle DarmstadtSteubenplatz 1, is open until July 23, Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.