Thomas Fiebig doesn’t cease to assert the influence of urban art on his painting. Like him, street artists have the credit of denouncing the sudden and permanent destruction of his environment under the pretence of modernisation. He sets his free and deconstructing eyes on what the city exposes, with the purpose of digging up a deeper truth over its deceptive evidences, sometimes on indecent non-sense images that possesses it. The order sought by the society is nothing more than the architecture of appearances. It imposes its marketable logic to overwhelming desires of mankind.
In this quest for truth, Thomas Fiebig uses a language characterized by its painful irony, which badly hides certain despair.

Thus, the hamburger becomes a target, ready-to-eat, mass-produced, rapidly filled up and quickly absorbed. This mobile food, saturated with standardized products to melt in the mouth, despite their pyramidal stacking, tend to industrialize the stomach’s feeding.

The hamburger series, proposed by the artist, denounces in his own way this culture of battery-farmed citizens. Pop Art faithfully claimed our everyday objects as irreversible facts of our post-industrialized culture, although it re-established them faithfully (as seen with the Campbell’s soup cans or the one dollar bills). On the other hand, Thomas Fiebig dynamites the representation of these breathtaking sandwiches, tender but without any substance, spreading stuff, in fact, and by choice, of suspicious mushrooms or shapeless verticals, of indistinct ingredients compressed, ready for a basic mastication and hasty digestion. The colors shine, pour, overflow and blur the consistence of the offered means of sustenance to the point of depriving us from clearly identify its stage of assimilation.

Thomas Fiebig wants to dramatize the stake of his belief, by grinding forms with an appetite that we don’t dare calling carnivore. His eccentric hamburgers claim for a civilization where individuals, integrated to a diabolical food chain, are at the same time consumers and digested. The standardized taste raises the artist’s disgust, moving him away from a realistic representation of the hamburger in order to unveil its fundamental essence.

Thomas Fiebig carefully prepares his work on computer, before originally reproducing it on the canvas. Instead of being in the quest of copying his digital scheme, he would rather explore its free translation delivered by painting’s rough materiality, submissive to inspiration hazard. He deconstructs, therefore recreates, what he sees and then declines it as so many singular works, infernal flock that domesticates our appetites.

ADDICT Galerie is pleased to present this series on the occasion of Thomas Fiebig’s first personal exhibition in Paris.

Written by René Bonnell