A bedroom looks in on itself. A train drives through a dark forest. A bench looks out on a rocket launch over a lake. These are already all the nearly impossible scenarios one would find in the solo presentation with Christoph Steinmeyer. Michael Janssen will be glad to present the newest works by the German artist in the Galleries-section of art berlin 2018.

Steinmeyer’s paintings challenge viewers and the very act of viewing, and they have prompted curator and critic Mark Gisbourne to position them in a category located between archaic and modern-day notions of amazement. He calls attention to the “distant, if not to say at times, somewhat puzzling realities” presented in Steinmeyer’s newest works—a quality that gives them a surrealist tinge. But as he suggests with his citations of Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Borges, the works are as much in conversation with philosophy, literature, and music as they are with the history of art and the language of dreams. 

Perhaps the most mind-bending element of the solo presentation would be the namesake Sweet Situation (2018). Here Steinmeyer has compounded his formal and conceptual antics into a single image: a mutely colored bedroom. 

From outside the frame, it seems possible the room is sandwiched between mirrors, yet not even a simple mise en abîme is spared the artist’s sabotage, for the reflections do not correlate to their context. And even if they did accurately repeat the interior design, they would do nothing to explain the liquesent downward pull occurring in the foreground—a proverbial slippery slope, which takes us into a mysterious world where causal relationships no longer abide by common expectation. Instead, the uncanny prevails. 

According to Gisbourne, the piece provides “a key to the other paintings”, in that it opens “onto a world that appears eloquently plausible in the first instance, but when closely scrutinised reveals an unfolding conundrum of visual contradictions.”