Torsten Slama
Zementwerk (Cement Works), 2008
Oil on canvas
48 ¾ x 34 ½ inches
Courtesy Galerie Vera Gliem, Cologne

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Berlin-based Torsten Slama's work currently on display in Houston is a dead-pan stab at 21st century allegory, a bit of post-realist psychoanalytic narrative with a smirk. At times Slama's work appears only a few steps removed from that of Carl Grossberg (1894-1940), a painter associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity) movement in Germany in the 20s and 30s. Slama shares Grossberg's icy exactitude, his constant return to satirical, gently neo-primitivist industrial subjects. The show itself can be roughly divided into two categories: dry, autumn-hued paintings on board and large, soft, illustration-style pencil drawings.

The drawings feature a series of Oedipal dramas, many starring the same, bearded and bespectacled male figure. I found the drawings too self-consciously awkward and their implied narration too dry to be seriously intriguing, but the ambivalent take on psychoanalysis' standard dramas is humorous. The catalogue accompanying the show wishes us to attribute Slama's mysterious male subject to his lack of a father figure (!), but it is entertaining enough to cast this sometimes-nude, sometimes-pipe smoking figure as Freud himself. In more than one image, he is holding a fat cigar or a short wooden bat, chasing a young man through the woods or skulking outside a boy's dormitory. Why not?
In his painted works, Slama presents quaint, empty post-apocalyptic landscapes that feature industrial buildings rendered in a skewed orthogonal perspective and the occasional non-sequitor: a statue, a gorilla, a single-speed bicycle. The titles of the works often identify an absurd or whimsical manufacturing capacity for the pictured buildings. In Geröllmine (Rubble Mine, 2005) and Walt-Whitman-Gedenk-Raffinerie (Walt Whitman Memorial Refinery, 2005), buildings work as stage sets on lunar landscapes rendered with soft airbrushing. Puffy airplane trails in the sky, distant hills and craters in the foreground are whispy and a bit too smooth. Slama's architecture is hilariously similar to banal Second Life computer renderings: window highlights are too consistent to be "right," edges are too sharp, the buildings themselves evidently drafted before receiving surface treatments of painted faux-brick or faux-wood.

It is Slama's attention to tiny details in these chalky, board mounted paintings that give them more than a touch of a De Chirico or Magritte-style Unheimlichkeit: TV antennas, wiring, rivets on steel containers or mysterious hovering objects are meticulously rendered. The curve of a sadly isolated lamp-post and bits of unidentified industrial mechanical parts that litter the foreground are weirdly elegant, even as they are illustrated with a childish attention to detail. In writing, Slama finds the need to explicate precisely what is symbolized by the various unusual pictorial elements, but the peculiar rigor and strangeness of his work stands on its own. This post-apocalyptic and computer-generated Sachlichkeit of psycho-sexual tensions might seema bit dry and opaque, but Slama plays to the side of whimsy, never taking any of these fantasies too seriously.

Lauren Hamer is a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin.