Erik Swars &
Tobias Muno

Dies und das.

In the collaborative work "This and That" by Erik Swars and Tobias Muno, image and text collide to create a 74-page collage of individual square sheets.

Erik Swars' Polaroids obscure and accentuate a text collection by Tobias Muno that he has created over the past ten years and is approximately 2.7 million characters long. This corpus comprises the development of a philosophical position he calls the metaphysical remoteness of subjectivity. In it, Tobias Muno explores the paradox that every property requires a bearer, yet every bearer itself brings properties. His examination has produced a prose that meanders through genres, attempting to level the distinction between fiction and theory in order to excavate the conclusion of a vehement duality. Analogously, Erik Swars explores the paradox that every painting requires a surface, but there is no surface that is not also a painting. His surface painting, like his photography, is situated at the tipping point between abstract flatness and figure, so that between landscape painting and color field the boundaries become fluid.

From the mass of text material, text surfaces have been created, which in a rereading of the author have been underlined in pencil and which now highlight poems from the mass of letters. These underlined text surfaces have become the underpinnings for Erik Swar's Photographic Interventions. They draw from his photographic practice focusing on Polaroid's Spectra format. He selected motifs from his archive for "This and That" and draped them on the lead deserts. In some cases, he added painterly accents to his interventions.

With "This and That" an artist's book has emerged that combines a textual long-term exposure with the legible ephemerality of photography, and seeks out the collage as a genre in order to reformulate the conflict between medium and content, between shape and surface, and between I and Thou.


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