Who would have thought that it would still be necessary to insist that representation and reality differ from one another? This rhetorical question is addressed in The Scandal of Pleasure (1996). Even today, almost thirty years later, the deceptive contradictions of art, that theorist Wendy Steiner explores, are just as relevant as they were back then. The Scandal of Pleasure reports from the battlefield of contemporary culture, a landscape littered with the remnants of disreputable artworks and discredited ideologies. Acting both as a sign of reality and as an entity in its own right, art deliberately mixes meaning and being. Art seems to convey an extremely intense experience of reality without, however, being directly part of it. Therefore, a distinction must be made between fiction and non-fiction, between the figurative and the literal, between virtuality and reality: “A super-realist canvas […] may look very much like reality, but it is still a flat surface covered with paint and hence not reality at all.” (Wendy Steiner)

The works of Marius Steiger make it particularly difficult for us to distinguish between reality and illusion: his paintings not only imitate individual motifs and objects, but sometimes even carry their appearance beyond their own borders. In Steiger’s artistic practice, one finds both rectangular and shaped canvases: the latter use the spatial conditions as a background, as a spatial surface, to refer to and interact with. Paintings of individual mushrooms, flowers and fruits, planet-like circles and shelves with abstract book spines transform the rooms into supposed phantasmagorias. Taking their deceptive manoeuvre one step further, the paintings of a mirror and several wooden planks do not necessarily abstract the given spaces, but expand them in their supposed functionality. However, the mirror does not reflect and the wooden planks deny us supposed access through already closed door frames. Starting with individual depictions, Steiger transforms the ground floor into a kind of “holistic still life”: the individual images are just as important as the big picture. In one of the conference rooms, there are perhaps more classical-looking, rectangular paintings. However, the compositions, which also include flowers and fruits, do not seem as motionless and “morte” as the historical genre of still life largely defines itself. In the immaculate perfection and fragmentation of Steiger’s works, they rather reveal their artificiality and their origin in the digital world.

The various works play with our expectations of their depicted characteristics and spatial references. Marius Steiger repeatedly refers to reality by reassembling it. He creates an illusory world in which deception and fact are particularly closely intertwined. This very balancing act between reality and artificiality is an essential part of the experience of art, as it is in our constantly changing, technologically savy present. Representation and reality may be different, but we still have real reactions to unreal events.

— Marlene Bürgi