Horizontal lines inevitably create landscapes or spatiality for the eye, as the word horizon already emphasizes. By working with vertical lines and stripes that dissolve due to their blurring, Michael Marcel Fuchs deliberately wants to hide specific spaces or places. The lines create a background layer that denies any connection or relationship to the objects in the foreground. Non-places emerge.

The term “non-places” was coined by the French sociologist Marc Augé. He uses it to describe places that have no individual meaning or identity due to their standardized design and functions. They are interchangeable and have no specific history or culture associated with them.

Airports, shopping centers, rest stops, parking lots, beaches or even hotel chains, which are often designed in a standardized manner and offer similar services all over the world, but also the tent camps of displaced people and refugees are often transitory, as people usually only use them for a short time and then move away again. They are anonymous and uniform, they enable forced, rapid or efficient transit or consumption, but offer no opportunity for identification or interaction with local culture and history. Today's developments, such as digitalization or artificial intelligence, reinforce these tendencies and shift non-places into virtual reality.

Michael Marcel Fuchs traces these non-places and addresses the tension between space, history, identity and people in his images. Two running women are on the finish line. There is a limited space under your feet that makes it impossible to see a target. This space is detached from the place, cut off from any cultural, historical or social meaning. Other figures in his paintings appear like floating fragments of ancient or medieval sculptures that dissolve into gestural painting. Or they are observations of people arriving, waiting or crossing public spaces. In addition to the figurative elements, his pictures consist of abstract fragments, hints of form or open line formations, which always compete with the flowing color surfaces in the background.

And yet that's not everything. The artist leads us into peculiar, mysterious worlds that have an effect that defies language and that can be described primarily as poetic.

E.H.