Steve Vizens, currently a post-graduate student with Sighard Gille, is not afraid of breaking taboos. He walks the borderline between painting and parody, a Helge Schneider of the young Leipzig scence. His light-hearted punch-lines provoke the serious connoisseur: Is it suitable to laugh at paintings? Vizens seems to be aiming for the ridiculous. He is taking a risk: if you come across as too entertaining, you are running danger of not to being taken serious. The painter plays the colwn, puts on a cardborard nose, dresses up Tischbein`s Italian Goethe as a harlequin and puts Watteau`s >>Gilles<< on stage. Watteau´s Comedia dell´ Arte character´s apperance is probably no accident in this context: it is a figure that Vizens is likely to identify with. However, he places a heavy build hippopotamus skull on his shoulder, the gaping mouth in opposition to the inward look on Watteau´s tragic hero´s face. This is a celebration of nonsense and reversal. In Vizens paintings the features of the world are grotesquely distorted. Vizens takes from the stocks of art history, picking up poses and physiognomies by Hohlbein, Velasquez and Van Dyk, but the same time he also uses , paints over and alienates magazines artworks with the Nonchalance of a Jeff Koons.
Jan Nicolaisen