We carry it in our pockets, as calculator, as Palm computer, as cell phone; we use it to buy tickets, move the car, deactivate the alarm system, collect money; we write texts with it, create graphics; it ”calls” us? ”Number 512, please”? It announces, promises, calculates; then at home again, we use it for cooking, baking, finally laying our heads down before it: the screen, the display, the monitor. This is the window, the sign, the signpost, and the plaque of the 21st century, informer and comforter all in one, the first omnipresent, multifunctional and even portable image instrument. A globally operating insurance group no longer decorates the bedrooms of their new training center with graphic works by Hundertwasser or Miró, but only with a flat screen displaying the menu, the program for the day, stock market information and feature films, singly or in parallel.

If we lock the doors, close the windows, let down the blinds and hang light boxes in the place of windows, then we have an allegory for the new constellation, the novel, twisted, indirect routes that perception takes because of it. Then we also understand why the term ”Windows” is inappropriate (”Instead-of-all-Windows” would be more complicated, but more apt) and why net-surfers are so pale and lacking oxygen. The so-called ”window” is a self-illuminating screen that blocks original, direct, sensory perception, a view of the world, a glimpse into nature, touching, smelling and tasting substances. It dramatically changes the distance to what was once an object of observation, although it does so almost noiselessly and with technological coolness. It stirs up our sense of space and sense of order and presses it flat against a screen. Surface sport. Galileo rewind: ”The [new electronic] world is a flat disk.” (Vitus H. Weh)

The screen is today‘s blind alley, not opaque, not made of bricks, but rather of translucent frosted glass, flat, but creating an illusion of depth. In it, information forms recognizable and readable signs that we enter ourselves, that are ”scratched on a blackboard” or tapped from from the global superpressure container. Most of the information is obtained through a rigidly predetermined grid via display filters: electronic horns of plenty. Plato's Allegory of the Cave may be a suitable allegory for the screen, but it leaves out the endless data-flows, data-jams and data-chaos: B2B, C2C, B2C, data is shifted from Business to Business, Consumer to Consumer, Business to Consumer. The world, the real one outside, even has its own acronym: RL for Real Life. Real Life is hard, Web Life is cool. What about surveillance? Who knows whether or not we are all being registered and categorized? Not through a camera in the monitor casing, but on the basis of our data consumption. On the ”drip” at the office, on the ”drip” at home? Public and private are dissolved in this omnipresent, decentralized, ”cubist" panopticon that promises an overview but does not deliver: ”There is a ray everywhere, that is blinding.” (Dietmar Kamper)

Günther Selichar deals with this virulent contemporary (and future) phenomenon. As in his earlier work Who's Afraid of Blue, Red and Green? and Sources, he focuses on connecting the representational means of pictorial photography with ideas of abstract, radical painting, enriched by reflections on the presence and the methods of electronic media.

This time, however, his focus is not on the color structure, the build-up of the image, the representational mode of video monitors, nor the basic tone of the carrier and transfer medium – the humming and buzzing of the medium itself – but rather on the screen as interface between the real and the virtual, the analog and the digital world. Media images make us forget the medium, the better they are themselves, meaning the more brilliant and fine-grained the photography is, the higher the resolution, the definition of the video is. Conversely, they tell much more about the medium itself the more the image ”sticks” to the medium, when the structure of the medium remains omnipresent in the picture, as with a fax transfer. If the image breaks down entirely, we are faced with a medium without a function, a box, an apparatus.

This is precisely the situation that Selichar's images refer to. They concentrate on the screen that is parked, switched off, when its objectness becomes apparent. Screens, cold, as the works are entitled. When it is cold, the screen embodies cool, quiet monochromy, when it is hot, switched on in other words, it is the epitome of chattiness. In a cold state, it is the abstraction of the form and concretization of the object; in its hot state, we forget about the furniture entirely and follow the comic-like, the conquest of reduced figuration and the hectic and highly erratic narration. Paper is patient, they say, but screens are even more patient (but more determinative, instead).

Once they have been turned off, Selichar places a light on the screens. The screen, the (window) glass itself is shifted to the center, so does it relinquish its own coloredness? Monochrome green, blue, gray, gray-green, gray-blue, military green or billiard table green? It makes us aware of its own form, from the short right angle to the extended one, from the video monitor to cinerama format to the ratio of one to three of an electronic agenda. The unified heights of the works call attention to the extension of the forms and to their curves. Despite their (photographic) monochromy, the works seem intended to be reminiscent of the plaque of old, except that the ”frame” has been shifted into the picture. Edged monochromes with edges that are darker than the surfaces and vice versa, with shadows that trigger a light trompe-l'oeil effect; almost monochromes, since the enlargements of the monitors in the picture tear open the closed compactness of the color.

Ilfochrome on Alucobond and then coated with a high-gloss lamination (in the edition Iris Giclée prints behind glass), so that the pictures reflect, throwing back the viewer's gaze, apparently impenetrable. Smooth, austere, cool photographs of monitors that are like that, too, ”interfaces between the person looking and that which is represented,” as Selichar says. Yet they are also interfaces between a concrete object and a monochrome surface, between a presentation of the means and a representation of what is obscured, between abstraction and real-like, synthetic depiction, between visible impenetrability and invisible, hidden eternity, which can be accessed with a click.

Selichar‘s photographs of electronic screens have the effect of the calm before or after a storm, a smooth, geometrically planned reservoir in rough mountain terrain. We are mirrored in it, modern souls cast themselves down on its mirror-smooth surface (when it is smooth, switched off, the screen suggests a plethora of hidden things, is a hermetic projection surface), and in the end, they probably conceal a quiet yearning inside: a yearning for a new wholeness, for a new compilation of the heterogeneous parts, for the ability to merge the fragmented, hybrid worlds into a new, bearable ground.

”I like creating a paradox between mass media reflection and an original view. ... The point is that between the viewer and the image product, being opposite one another is still an important movement.” (Günther Selichar)