Thomas Kratz presents new works that each share – in terms of their physical proportions and rhetorical order – the two-dots and inverted arc that is the emoticon grin, or the ‘smiley’ as it’s otherwise known. This same emaciated face is the medium for a gestural and commercial wishfulness, despite the sticker and t-shirt campaigns of Acid House and general non-compliance throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The smiley is rather a kind of framework for Kratz’s works, but the same character script is also their fogged subject and symbolic condition. These are works that do not act out the smiley as a socio so n’ so, but rather use it as an ordination point between material edifices and rhetorical manoeuvres.

These works have qualities of interaction, in the sense that the surface has been evidently rendered and reworked, or rather evolved – through filters of matted colour and structural combination. Kratz’s works are sometimes underfed and over-applicated in their moodiness. The smiles are sometimes less satisfied, more strategic, and their materiality transfixed. In certain works the surface collapses its tensions, and takes on a particular sheer presence.

There is also their fraternal aspect, in that the works appear teamed together in provisional steps of individuation, variation and resemblance. In some works the rounded facial features switch into alternate basic shapes, pixelate or become obscured, deleted or overworked. In others, the face seems to rise to the foreground like a bright sovereign power that assumes (and superficially commands) the order of all background appearances.

There is a constant sense of emergence or coming to the surface in Kratz’s work. Fractured checkerboard patterns and other formal sequences jostle for position, with more figurative and painterly reference locked behind the sickened beam of the smile. A cheshire cat and a mechanical bird both make an appearance in a number of Kratz’s works, in a reconfigurement of Balthus’ representational-polemical arrangements.

The achievement of these works is their articulated casualness, that doesn’t limit or prescribe their seriousness, but makes it difficult to place. Kratz has produced works that are drawn outside of deadlock, contingent in their own internal logic and climatic condition.

Text: Matt Packer