manship: a thoroughly consequential combination. Even though badness wasn’t only being tested in artistic practice, but also gladly in the social/interpersonal sphere. Anyway, this form of negation has found wide acceptance on both the institutional and market sides of art ever since; it’s a precedent with staying power. It’s hasn’t been uncommon (up to and including this very day) for artists to reach for the brush, of all the tools availa- ble to art, as an act of defiance against intellectual trends and artistic zeitgeists. at fact desperately needs to be ta- ken into consideration in light of the revitalization program Painting has experienced over the past ten years—without “re-”exploring Painting as a conceptual or image-making medium, significant either in its position towards Art or even simply as a cultural form. As successfully as Painting’s revitalization qua discursive figure transpired, a reckoning either with Painting itself, or as a discursive or pictorial medium effective above and bey- ond itself, has been lacking—precisely from an institutional perspective—in recent art history. In the 1990s, a totally and completely unemphatic vindication of Painting took shape, coupled with the—also formally/methodically-critical, con- ceptually/functionally-oriented—expansion of Painting as an experimental and communicative format for journalistic/ essayist, conceptual, and research-based processes. Painting found renewed politically motivated use qua genre, so as a specific cultural form within art. at would link Reski’s approach with that of artists like Stephan Ettlinger, Joseph Kramhöller, Antje Majewski, Dierk Schmidt, Andreas Siek- mann, and Amelie von Wulffen and permit relevant points of comparison. As a Painter—and underscored by side projects in art criti- cism and curatorial work—Reski has chosen a position that effectively forces a flexible treatment of Painting, a position that can do no more than establish a distance to its own activity, no matter if all the different approaches and practi- ces are formatted, so to say, by Painting qua core subject and field of operation and reference. Every approach, every practice derived from that field, may, in and of itself, lead toward Painting’s horizon but, at the same time, they always have to be thought of in a reciprocal relationship to one another. at is the expanded art of the combination with which Reski keeps Painting running as a material-powered image and thought machine that will, despite all its histori- cally demonstrated instability and against all odds, only be put to sensible use. Translation by Carrie Roseland 2016) it’s a slightly different and perhaps more problematic story. In this case, even the naysayers would have to concede that this is a “painting”—a perspective composition which also happens to be an attractive, sublime view into the deep valley of a shopping cart: an almost perfectly square panel painting, in the style of a modern consumerist still life of adequately prosaic realism featuring a sadly tiled back- ground/floor—a work for which acrylics were apparently also utilized in addition to oil on linen. Again, there is script in this image, although this time pressing somewhat brazenly into the foreground in the form of a logo, and this script may be registered as compositional collateral damage, a spot of paint and—in spite of all commercial intent—ig- nored. e logos reinforce the register of realism: of course supermarkets are usually part of a chain, products indicate their manufacturers, and the concomitant logos must be painted in, too, if this is primarily a matter of a Still Life with Commodities in Shopping Cart. However—the selec- tion of purchases presents a little riddle, even at first glance: a single red rose (Rose), blue underpants (Unterhose), and what appears to be a can (Dose) of ravioli. Granted, you’d need to know some German to unpack the depicted objects on the linguistic/phonetic level—and “read” them in the spirit of the piece’s title—as the components of an aleatory rhyme chain you could probably extend indefinitely once begun… Aren’t the lottery tickets (Lose) and extra tomato sauce (Soße) missing? And anyway: isn’t there something else missing here, something else entirely—depth, for in- stance, or the other extreme, a level of artistic advancement? Of course it would be easy to object to such emphatically “flat” image concepts, and they do run through Reski’s body of work like a red thread that keeps giving. Doesn’t an art that deploys humor, deformation, and redundancy, even if the point is to unmask them, nonetheless risk prompting a tiny “oh” (got it) instead of a big “aha” (of realization)? Reski is far removed from the grand gesture, the dramatic boom effect—in both the painterly and artistic sense. at which speaks individually from his works also crops back up again in dealing with them, such as in the way they are installed, and bespeaks a posture (toward Art, but also to- ward us, the audience) which both places compatibility over exclusivity and tries to offer and maintain the most direct access possible. Part of that is also that the invitation to participate and comprehend is not only extended in image/ text riddles, but also pronounced across installations—se- rial, episodic, or combinatorial hangings—that point to something beyond the individual painting or work. At any rate, Reski’s practice, which has been established since the early 1990s, definitely stands out from those precedent cases particular to German painting of the 1980s, in that he insists on on a perspective from below. Back then, lots of cocky paintings, no joke, were actually painted with hairy sticks and excessive masculine gestures, very Rock’n’Roll, dominated the scene—and not without issuing a verdict on the tense struggle between high and low, although that tension has essentially been productive for art, and that decision went to the top, toward high art. In particular, the “courage to be bad,” demonstrated with such great aplomb in Painting—in bad painting that has matured into a museum-quality genre and/or evolved into a theoretically ensured and academically professed formula, for instance—went surprisingly well with the rush to states- 71