the-crit
REVIEW 1 - April 12th 2025
Copy, Paste, Erase, Reveal: Mathias Pöschl’s Quiet Resistance
A short review of Mathias Pöschl at sehsaal (Vienna) by Frank Wasser
Mathias Pöschl’s paintings don’t necessarily begin with a canvas or a brush. Pöschl subjects select found and source images—text fragments, brush marks, graphic motifs—to rounds of duplication using standard Xerox printers. With each image, the machine introduces its own noise: toner fades, contrast distorts, paper shifts. These mechanical irregularities—often seen as flaws—become central to the work’s vocabulary. Once these copies reach a certain density of degradation, Pöschl adheres them to wooden panels. The outcome is a surface embedded with both repetition and decay—where the imperfections of the machine are not corrected, but cultivated.
From there, Pöschl begins to unmake the image. This negative painterly intervention involves scraping, dissolving, and subtracting the toner and glue from the surface. Solvents, blades, sandpaper, and other tools are used not to add pigment, but to pull it away. What’s left—ghosted lines, smudged outlines, residual figures—is not imposed by the artist, but slowly revealed through removal. These aren’t images painted onto a surface; they are images excavated from one.
This tripartite process—mechanical reproduction, physical manipulation, and conceptual layering—recurs throughout Pöschl’s exhibition, which features thirteen works, all rendered mostly in black-and-white. In o.T. (Punkt 12) (2024), a page from Mao’s Little Red Book is blown up to absurd proportions, its declaration—“XII. DIE POLITISCHE ARBEIT”—hovering in the middle of the frame. The text, despite its didactic history, is softened by wear: toner is faint, edges are blurred, letters tremble under the strain of enlargement. Mounted on wood and hung in front of a wall-sized grid of more photocopies (o.T., 2025), the piece resists political clarity. The surface instead tells another story—a record of mechanical friction and deliberate interference, a political gesture embedded not in message, but in method.
This insistence on degradation as form recalls theorist Hito Steyerl’s concept of the “poor image”—not as a failure, but as a “copy in motion,” an image that “tends toward abstraction… a visual idea in its very becoming.”¹ Pöschl doesn’t just allow for this abstraction—he engineers it. By repeating the copy until it breaks down, and then working through the surface like an archaeologist, he creates images that are fragile, partial, and persistently unresolved. They don’t arrive fully formed. They emerge.
The Xerox machine itself, which Pöschl uses so extensively, has its own complex history. Introduced in 1959, the Xerox 914 was the first fully automatic plain-paper copier. It was revolutionary for its time, promising unprecedented efficiency and accessibility in offices across the world. However, the machine was also notorious for its imperfections: prone to overheating and requiring constant maintenance, the Xerox 914 was a tool of both convenience and technical failure. This combination of productivity and error became integral to the cultural and technological evolution of the copy machine, shifting it from a high-tech business tool to a ubiquitous, sometimes glitchy, everyday object. The original Xerox 914 was so prone to overheating it came with its own fire extinguisher. Over time, it perhaps has come to symbolise the contradictions of mass production—efficiency alongside entropy, automation alongside imperfection. This historical context plays out in Pöschl’s work. The Xerox machine, once a symbol of bureaucratic efficiency, becomes Pöschl’s partial collaborator in both image production and degradation. He embraces the machine’s limitations—the fading toner, the uneven contrast—as a means of creating new, unanticipated forms. By copying an image again and again, degradation sets in. Toner breaks down, contrast shifts, smudges creep into the frame. The resulting photocopies are not final products but scores—indexes of entropy, waiting to be worked into form.
From there, Pöschl proceeds counterintuitively. He does not build the image up, but removes it. Toner is scraped, rubbed, and fluidity dissolved. Solvents and blades become his tools of painting. What remains on the surface is what couldn’t be erased—the remnants of ghostly forms revealed through labour.
This method is a way for Pöschl to make labour visible—not through grand, expressionist gestures, but through quiet persistence. As he reflects, the political dimension of his work lies in the way it "looks like it’s been worked." It’s not just about what the paintings depict, but about how they embody the process of their creation. This approach emphasises an ethic of visibility that aligns with working-class values—acknowledging endurance, care, and the time invested in making something by hand.
o.T. (bird is the word) (2024) presents six small, arching forms across a broad surface. They resemble the letter “m” or, more precisely, how a child (or adult) might draw a bird in flight—two loops, hovering midair. The image is light, whimsical, a Xeroxed memory of innocence. And yet it was made through the same intensive act of removal. Its softness is not innate but excavated. The same “m” shape reappears, albeit in a very different register, in 6 x o.T. (2025), where Pöschl uses printed fabric pulled from sportswear—specifically, the “M” from a University of Michigan team jersey. Here, the boldness of institutional branding is subjected to the same slow process of degradation and removal. The letter becomes a fragment of cultural iconography undone by repetition, no longer triumphant or legible but worn and tentative. This unexpected echo between the childlike "m" of the birds and the collegiate "M" from sports branding draws a subtle line through the show: one letter oscillating between innocence and institutionalism, between symbolic flight and mass production. The resonance is formal, but also deeply thematic—suggesting that even our simplest gestures, like drawing a bird, are caught in larger systems of replication and meaning.
Pöschl’s commitment to process is also a statement about labour. Looking at the edges of the work, the intense labour of their making is visible. This ethos speaks to a politics rooted not in iconography but in material: an insistence on visibility, on care, on time. The work values slowness, effort, and physical engagement in a culture that prizes immediacy and automation. Benjamin Buchloh’s writing on conceptual art and indexicality comes to mind. In describing the move away from expressive gesture toward process-based documentation, Buchloh suggests that “[the] indexical procedures of the 1960s… render visible the labour of production while resisting the myth of originality.”² Pöschl’s work similarly eschews expressive flourishes in favour of methodical removal—yet in doing so, he reclaims a different kind of expressivity, one rooted in the accumulation and erosion of form.
There’s no nostalgia here for a pre-digital age. Rather, Pöschl enters into dialogue with technology’s limits. He welcomes the glitches, the toner shortages, the unpredictability of the copy process. The image, for him, is never stable. It is something that must be re-found, uncovered, and earned.
¹ Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal #10 (2009).
² Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October, Vol. 55 (Winter 1990), pp. 105–143.
Installation shots courtesy of the artist.
© 2025 by Frank Wasser