Heimo Wallner employs an “automatic” sketching technique, a frame-by-frame, subconscious repetition where one image follows the next in an endless cycle which lacks narrative of any kind. Central to his work Menudo (1997) is the figure of a masked man with empty eye slits- a kind of feral everyman, an uninhibited, vulgar, and violent figure bent on self-destruction. Floating around him, flickering in and out of existence to the beat of a pounding rhythm and feverish music are external and internal body parts. One can see figures digesting, consuming and vomiting food, cycles of growth and decay, fervor, eruption and its aftermath, birth and death. All are born and perish in one long and uninterrupted flow that constructs a lexicon of violence and passion, of seeking and destruction. In these two works, as well as many others, music is of utmost importance- it is an agitating, corrosive component, an essential element that eats away at accepted norms and illusion.
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