Sadness is an Evil Gas Inside of Me

About

Stine Omar & Max Boss
„Sadness is an Evil Gas Inside of Me is an absence of present, set in a future that holds an infinite potential for manifold pasts, pasts that show through the subconscious that determines the objects and spaces that shape this ambiguous future: escalators, pastries, parking lots, microwavable pop corn, highways, deserts and shopping malls.

The series offers little of the spectacle typically inherent to its form. There is almost no spoken dialogue, unless it is for instance part of a commercial break that has managed to bleed into the fabric of the video piece. Instead, a set of disembodied voices leads us through mysterious events with quicksilver charm. “A single moment of true sadness connects you instantly to all the suffering in the world,” one of the voices quotes Chris Kraus. Yet in a tomorrow that might as well still get cancelled due to lack of demand, the hungry bodies that populate it avoid conventional interaction. Connections are appropriately interior in a world of surfaces.

In Sadness is an Evil Gas Inside of Me, Stine Omar and Max Boss use video as its own form of writing, where images juxtapose, irritate and enhance the spoken word; where the unsayable finds shape and expression. It is a soap opera in the guise of an essay film, or an essay film in soap opera drag. Its main characters are in a constant state of transition, from Mersad towards Yung Corn and from Holidays Bossi to Max, their distant bodies moving rhythmically in isolation. It is an introvert’s soap opera, where conflict, drama and romance aren’t acted out but instead reflect in the brain like the afterimage of a strobe light. (Text by Vika Kirchenbauer)  

Charlie Roberts
Inspired by the idiosyncratic visual language of Sadness is an Evil Gas Inside of Me, the dreamy motifs of Charlie Roberts’ pastel-tinted works echo and reflect on Omar and Boss’ video piece. A hazy atmosphere permeates the artist’s scenes. His is a world of free floating forms, where tables and beds tip up and plants resemble algae caught in the waves of the sea – everything is in motion, nothing is still, all sense of gravity seems lost in swirls of light and colour. Roberts’ gouaches also mirror the intense interiority of Sadness is an Evil Gas Inside of Me, situating the protagonists in closed spaces and flesh-colored enclosures with Matisse-like lightness.   

Merging the art historical with the contemporary, Roberts forges his own form of painterly pop culture, where the subject matter is at odds with the delicacy of the medium used to depict it. The pearly opaqueness of gouache meets the hard-edged lines of the iPhone, and renders women sporting tank tops and denim cut-offs in the style of the modern masters. In an eclectic blend of painterly tradition with the icons of 21st century living, Roberts’ art eludes clear categorisation and is thus uniquely placed to accompany Omar and Boss’ similarly genre-defying work.