Daniela Wageneder

Finally – Always Never in Paradise
Daniela Wageneder-Stelzhammer, on the series Offline, 2025

The world is finite, the world is full of countable and entangled entities.(1)  
Roland Barthes

White acrylic paint spread by hand over the surface of a tablet; removing the paint creates a painting. The screen does not only separate the inside from the outside. At this threshold, a delicate friendship unfolds between the white of the paint and the black of the screen. Between being there and not being there. By reducing the tablet to a surface, the artist resets our knowledge of the object. The tablet becomes more than the backdrop. It has not simply been painted over. It is a palimpsest.(2) A cover laid upon knowledge to which we no longer have access. From another time.(3)
 
Temporality also plays a role, the time spent in front of it. Not just the minutes and seconds of ­counted screen time, but the way in which we spend time in front of the screen respectively the painting. There is a qualitative antithesis here. Activities and ­expectations we learned to dinstinguish collide again. Osten undermines the screen. From the ­plethora of ­images to the singularity of a painting. From a ­window into ­another world to a mirage. (Somewhere else and not quite, the opposite of here and now. ­Painting is ­illusion. It requires the viewer to accept this ­illusion as reality.) This changes our attitude in front of it. The screen of the tablet is transformed from an object to be touched into one that ­defies our tactility. Olaf Osten disempowers the hand in ­favor of the eye. The noise of images comes to an end. Looking at images on a tablet is different from looking at a painted picture. On the one hand, there is ­quantitative consumption – images we look at yet never own. Each image gives way to another. ­Whereas ­looking at his ­painted landscapes, we contemplate. Longer, ­closer, more ­intensely, more thoroughly. The ­expectation is ­different in both cases. Temporality and ­ownership ­differ. One’s own is the victory of space over time. Here, the law of one’s own applies. A place is a ­momentary ­constellation of fixed points. It contains a hint of possible stability. A space is created when direction vectors, speed variables, and the variability of time are connected. A space is a network of moving elements. [...] It is therefore the result of activities [...] In contrast to a place, there is therefore neither the decidedness nor the stability of something ’own’.(4) The tablet ­becomes a space rather than a place. 

As in literature, I is never anyone else than the ­person who says I(5), as for visual art, the ­person looking at it is always the person looking at it at that very moment. The artist is the past of their own artwork. There is a before and after. The artist exists before the image, and the image in turn exists before us, the viewers. The creation of a present through the act of I is, according to Michel de Certeau, the present as actual temporality. It creates a before and an after. The existence of a now that means being ­present in the world.(6) As if his surname (Osten means the eastward one) constantly tempts him to gaze in one direction, Olaf Osten questions the nature of existence in his series Offline. 

Inspired by Romanticism, the raging sea shows the limits of human control, while the endless expanse and depth of the sea speak of longing and wanderlust. In ­Romantic painting, the sea represents the interplay between fascination and fear, control and surrender. Viewed from a safe position. In her dissertation, Heiderose Lange describes Caspar David Friedrich and his repertoire of images of the sea and shipwrecks as symbols of nature triumphing over the helpless insignificance of humans. In William Turner’s work, too, the turbulent sea ­symbolizes nature triumphing over man and his cultural achievements [...]. Moreover, it expresses the loneliness of man in nature and the longing to be part of something.(7) 

Olaf Osten’s series, comparable to Gerhard Richter’s seascapes, are fictional constructs, but – unlike Richter’s – without a direct media model. Inspired by Romanticism, the title Offline also takes up this ­dichotomous distinction and reflects the longing for a reality that is not man-made. The depiction of the sea in the Offline series is wild, gloomy, and deep black. Only spray hints at the strength and direction of the wind. The sky is mostly overcast, almost ominous, with wisps of fog and no sign of ­civilization or human life. There is no rescue ship in sight. Thrown back on one’s own existence. Osten’s ­series ­contains all components of a modern Robinsonade. Being offline seems almost ­synonymous with being stranded on a desert island. Cut off from the rest of the world, thrown back on ­oneself. ­Without contact with the outside world. The ­supposed ­paradise ­quickly ­becomes – lost in ­paradise. From The only paradise is ­paradise lost(8) to the ­critique of ­consumerism in I’m lost in the supermarket [...] It’s not here. It disappear.(9) it becomes clear that ­culturally, we have a lot to lose in paradise.

Osten’s series of paintings takes us to a distant place. There is no longer someplace else. We are the real thing.


(1) Barthes, Roland: Mythen des Alltags, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, First Edition 1964, p. 39.
(2) The term ‘palimpsest’ goes back to an ancient practice in which materials that had already been described were prepared for reuse for reasons of economy, for example by scraping them off.
(3) Vgl. De Certeau, Michel: Kunst des Handelns, Berlin, Merle Verlag, 1988, p. 88.
(4) De Certeau, Michel: Kunst des Handelns, Berlin, Merle Verlag, 1988, p. 217 ff.(5) Vgl. Barthes, Roland: Das Rauschen der Sprache, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, Erste Auflage 2006, p. 59.
(6) De Certeau, Michel: Kunst des Handelns, Berlin, Merle Verlag, 1988, p. 84.
(7) Langer, Heiderose: Das Schiff in der zeitgenössischen Kunst: eine ikonografische Analyse / Heiderose Langer, Essen, Verl. Die Blaue Eule, 1993, p. 112 ff.
(8) Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. “The only true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
(9) Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, Lost In The Supermarket (The Clash, London Calling 1979).


Daniela Wageneder-Stelzhammer is a curator for contemporary art specialized in exhibitions and projects spanning installation art, multimedia and pop culture.