Micha Payer and Martin Gabriel have started collaborating in 2000

Like many artists fresh out of art school, their initial efforts were characterized by a desire to experiment with different formal solutions, including sculpture, drawing, photography and animation, and although all these media are still very much part of their practice, drawing eventually prevailed. Parallel to this, the different but equally important question of establishing a way to effectively collaborate had to be investigated.

Their response turned out to be the creation of a visual dictionary – an ongoing collection of images that soon reached significant proportions and that the two regularly tap into with the two-folded objective of unify their efforts and reinforce the notion of seeing the diverse facets of their work as an oeuvre, where every single piece could be conceived as a valid narrative element in multiple contexts. This modus operandi introduced the concept of repetition as a feature closer to the idea of recurrence rather than seriality as intended by Pop art. Evidence of an inclination to explore the possibilities dictated by repetition and duality are tangible in some of the duo’s early photographs; this is the case of Im Fall (2006) from the series ‘Nuclear Family’, where the two artists and their child are depicted as if steamrolled by a series of identical panels; or Kabine (2005), where a man holding a guitar case stands in front of two identical elevator doors leading to apparently diverse scenarios.

When Payer Gabriel are drawing, however, their technique becomes visibly more elastic and versatile. ‘Who is doing what’, an interrogative inevitably attached to every collaborative venture, turns out to be superfluous as drawings are created with no designated areas of expertise and with a great deal of discussions aimed to figure out where the work is going. Some of their drawings express a thinly disguised preference for presenting objects or people as entities in perennial movement and abundant quantity with variable degree of realism. If Untitled/Drone#15 (2018), for example, offers a reasonably realistic picture of a loose formation of drones flying over a menacing grey sky, the heavy traffic of bikers in Untitled (Homo portans) (2014) is a scene defined by such perspectival variety and background neutrality to elude any potential mark of plausibility.

For further knowledge and interaction, Payer Gabriel actively participate in an education platform for students, where they share insights and experiences with aspiring artists, enriching the educational community with their expertise and collaborative spirit.

Michele Robecchi, Vitamin D3: Today’s Best in Contemporary Drawing, Phaidon, London, 2020

Conversely, works like the ink and pencil on paper doppelgänger (2017) and the botanical The Absence of Nothingness (2019) suggest a strong encyclopaedic feel. This factor is possibly unsurprising, given Payer Gabriel’s procedural mode. Yet their approach to the subject is not entirely acritical. Encyclopaedias traditionally bring together the most disparate notions to display them in authoritative fashion. In Payer Gabriel’s work, conflicting truths are gathered together to educate, entertain but also to raise existential dilemmas. Their images are a study on how the human brain works, with the never-ending battle between science as a source of information and philosophy as an interpretational device acting like a giant undertow. Portuguese version.