But what does it matter? I'd rather sweat than be a shivering eel.
In the morning I went to Pfeifer, the owner of the boxing stall, who was supposed to replace my jacket, which he had torn during the fight the night before. Pfeifer is one of those ominous guys. His eyes disappear into deep caverns and only blink out sometimes. His nose was almost squarely deformed. He smelled of whisky and wet laundry. With his nicotine-stained yellow fingers, he repeatedly smoothed his bushy moustache, usually clicking it. But not today. Pfeifer was dead. My jacket was ruined. But what does that matter when it's thirty degrees.
I went back to the caravan at the end of the main road, just behind the old supermarket, where at night a couple of teenagers in their pimped-out cars played disco. Not the best address if you ask me, but nobody does that. I lit a cigarette and drank a sip of cold, stale coffee, turned on the radio and looked through the battered blinds of the small caravan window. Angelique was painting her nails as usual at this time of day. She wanted to be a film star and dreamed of Hollywood. Sometimes I watched her imitating scenes from famous Hollywood films, dramatically staggering across the dusty dusk floor. The radio was playing a song by Gwen Stefani. It was the last song before the 4 o'clock news, saying again "RAID in...". I fell asleep. In my sleep I was overcome by a feeling of being watched, as if someone was creeping around me. I opened my eyes and he was standing there. Just like that.
Like a parcel just lying on the doorstep in the morning.
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Tim Sandow's contentual imagery feeds on the tragedy of the everyday, which can only be grasped through the sensitive observation of human gestures and situations. His chosen image excerpts appear like cinematic sceneries, which Sandow arranges sensitively and deliberately, thus acting in a staged manner.
Through disconcerting depictions of his protagonists, Sandow develops for himself a distanced but not self-excluding position of the viewer. This enables him to act without any classification. His painterly created in-between worlds create a gentle as well as radical view on social clichés without evaluating them. Sandow's narratives point to the quiet nuances of everyday interactions, which so often give rise to personal anecdotes and stories.
For some, perhaps a politically incorrect pub joke, for others a cinematic memoir. Inspired by film and photography, the artist creates his own worlds that allow the viewer to become part of a fictional script and, through the generated moment of a 'film still', a participant in the supposed production itself.
Tim Sandow, born in 1988, lives and works in Wuppertal, Germany. He graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien in 2019 with Daniel Richter.
