Eitel is a remote man, who experienced both analog and digital eras. Cultural lag is inevitable during the rapid social and technological advancement. Cultural Lag, an abstract concept, is difficult to precisely understand its meaning. However, once this concept is replaced with specific subjects in reality, one can realize that the lagged and disregarded beings are actually everyone. Eitel may or may not be one of these renegades. However, the melancholic vestige of the disregarded beings certainly appears in his works.

The figures in Tim Eitel’s paintings are common and ordinary people. Whether the figures are alone or in a group, they are isolated beings of the contemporary society. The figures are immersed in solitude and even weariness. The figures are placed in their own backgrounds, amidst the four-sided screen of paintings. Although the scenes and figures of Eitel’s paintings vary, the sentiments they carry are alike. The figures, whichever scene they are placed in, press against the space around them and naturally expose themselves. Eitel’s unique style peculiarly reveals the subject while keeping the balance between the figure and the surrounding space. This compels the viewer to stay longer in front of the painting and extend the time of observation and experience.

Suh Jinsuk | Director, Nam June Paik Art Center

Excerpt from “Tim Eitel – The Contemplative Extension of Time and Concentration of the Gaze”

Figures alone. More rarely, in groups. Shown in back or three-quarter back view. In the opposite case, without their features being identifiable. Absorbed mainly in solitary activities. In the process of writing or reading. Sketching a dance step. Striding through a landscape. Taking their place in a clinical interior. Observing a reality, exterior or interior, withdrawn every so often from the view of the women or men the pictures are intended for, these figures may signify an illusion of movement. But most often are stock still. As if frozen in photographic fixity. Arrested in time, so as to feign the satisfying of a chronophobia elevated to the status of dogma by the modernists. 

Tim Eitel has been renegotiating this modernist tradition for some fifteen years now, in pared-down compositions stripped of everything superfluous or trivial; compositions whose "pictorial" questionings are combined with the exploration and utilization of a stock of images and themes enriched year by year with new elements which, depending on the circumstances, open up fresh perspectives or infiltrate formulas previously tested out by the painter.

Erik Verhagen | Art Historian, University of Valenciennes

Excerpt from “Pictorial Fictions”