»DIE ERDE IST EINE SCHEIBE IN DER MITTE DES UNIVERSUMS«

In choosing his means, Thomas Sommer is none too gently. Oil, varnish, chalk, diverse pigment pens, sometimes even integrated sketch papers cause – securely wielded – fierce spectacles on his canvases. He leaves nothing undone to show us the formal apocalypse quite plainly. Also it seems him a grim desire to question coherences of things, to dupe the term “truth”, to stultify cognition and so-called progress. It’s him a pleasure to atomise the anyhow wispy supports of current world pictures just to recompose them later particle by particle through his own arbitrariness. It is always grotesques of pop culture and comic fiction that ally with painting and subjects of art history, thus serve crazy picture titles like »Agoniesimulator« [agony simulator] or »Das Ganze steuert der Blitz« [The lightening steers the whole issue]. In recent pictures of the series »Die Erde ist eine Scheibe in der Mitte des Universums« [Earth is a disk in the middle of universe] it is in witted ways symmetrical or framing arrangements that seize chaos. The thus picked-up medieval representation of alchemist and scientist ideas intimates the little distance to present-day world views in a chill-causing way. And how sheer the culture cover is that separates modern man from his metaphysical leavened ancestors becomes clear glimpsing shortly at new religious-fundamentalist tendencies also in western world. Consequently the grin over the spinned show in Thomas Sommers’ pictures is followed by a stale apprehension that they might have more to do with reality than the beloved values of the Enlightenment and modernity, that there is more truth in it than we would appreciate.