In painting, drips are to be avoided. Generally considered blunders, they are thought to interrupt what a painter might otherwise be trying to represent: this is what painting tutorials will tell you. Except Tobias Spichtig doesn’t seem to agree.
Conspicuous drips can be found on nearly all his canvases. They flow, without the Swiss artist wishing to tame them, from the peaks of his mountain abstractions, the feet of his nudes, and from sullen faces—each a portrait of a friend, model, designer, or actor. To make the latter, he primarily works from photographs, rarely from live models, often looking to several different images to create his composite vision. Frequently, there is enough of a likeness that you might (just) recognize the subject. Still, with or without their eyes painted in, this is an eerie bunch, all cheekbones and contouring, as pale as vampires seen in raking light.
That they all seem undead is not just formal because, for Spichtig, it goes deeper than that: “There’s something embarrassing about vampires,” the artist declares. “Like Udo Kier in the film Blood for Dracula [1974]. He’s totally embarrassing. Maybe painting is a vampire. It’s endlessly embarrassing. Both the act of painting and paintings themselves.
Perhaps that explains the self-deprecating quality of the title Everything No One Ever Wanted. It amounts to an assertion that within this exhibition is unloved stuff, worthy only of rejection—forlorn and without value. Yet, of all of Spichtig’s exhibitions, this one—his largest to date—marks a turning point at which the artist has abandoned his tendency almost to conceal his paintings, as if in embarrassment. Here, the “unwanted” is not just not hidden but, in fact, finally exposed. Ostentatiously.
In the past, it was barely possible to circulate within the artist’s exhibitions. He filled spaces with accumulations of used domestic consumer goods (worn couches, yellowing mattresses, phased-out air conditioning units), rendering his paintings on the walls behind them often only partially visible. The latter peeked out “like penises from under fig leaves,” as one critic wittily noted. Now, the artist doesn’t push the visitor out of the room. Instead, he installed a massive stage, and visitors have almost no choice but to step up onto it and have their gaze raised to view the paintings.
But make no mistake: Spichtig’s attachment to the stuff often left on the side of the road persists. He now simply compartmentalizes: the exhibition’s second room is filled with various used wardrobes, with a single uncanny portrait stuck upon rather than behind them. They are a reminder of what his accumulations had always hinted at: commodities cannot fully satisfy the covetousness they are designed to elicit, which we know even as we still consume them. So, we discard them, only to consume again new ones like them. Capitalism has made vampires of us all.
In the last room, a trio of nickel-plated gravestones stands as if propped on earthen mounds, all shimmering and silvery. A bloodred carpet lay beneath. The gravestones are carved with the artist’s characteristic scrawl, spelling out “All I Never Wanted” or “I Still Love You,” like sappy pop song titles. Slightly cartoonish but also inescapably morbid, this endpoint to the exhibition conveys a brooding Twilight vibe, while cinching the contradictions across Spichtig’s œuvre, between the absurd and the sincerely serious. Entrancing minimalist guitar riffs echo in the spaces. Spichtig asked the musician and composer Mick Barr (Ocrilim)—whose music the artist listened to avidly while painting— to develop a specially conceived soundscape for the show. The idea was to render each artwork a protagonist in something larger than itself: “The models and portraits are a bit like actors, a cast for the show. The exhibition thus becomes somewhat like a tragic comedy, with its own soundtrack.”
