Besides literary sources and computer games, Alois Mosbacher’s pictures have their starting point in his wide-ranging research on the Internet; on live acting role plays (LARP), for example, in which large groups of people meet in the woods in costume and armed with weapons in order to slip into foreign roles and stage faasy games in accordance with precise rules.
Alois Mosbacher sees the process of exploring the image material he finds as a sketch from which he derives additional levels of meaning through the process of painting and drawing, and which he uses to probe the possibilities of a new iconography of the landscape painting. Mosbacher contrasts the idea established since the Romantic period of the woods as a melancholic idyll with the very much older idea of the woods as a synonym for the unexplored, the dark and the frightening, which he brings dramatically up to date using unexpected props from contemporary civilisation—apparently forgotten travel bags, a covered car, an uninhabited hut. The woods appear as a utopian space for counterworld models, as a refuge for outsiders, and equally as a scene of and backdrop for crimes. This ambivalence and ambiguity of possibilities develops beyond moral implications in the individual pictures as well as in the narrative that emerges between them.
Mosbacher fans out his project into different groups of pictures which spread out on various different levels with no predefined direction, like in a video game. The architecture of unfolding partitions Mosbacher developed for the Out There exhibition highlights this open, non-linear quality of the narrative. With its tapering pathways, passages and squares his mise en scène creates a narrative in the space, leaving it up to the viewers to piece it together bit by bit or level by level.
Alois Mosbacher devotes equal attention to fundamental questions of painting as he does to the thematic and narrative conception of the pictures. The interplay of abstract and figurative means of expression is characteristic of his style of painting. In his works, the graphic precision of his gestural, dynamic brushstrokes is juxtaposed with free painting in which light and colour embody a high degree of autonomy, a style of painting that dissolves, and sometimes literally drips, over space and into colour structures.
