Christoph Ruckhaberle conceives Plakatwand with an intentional staginess. Rendered with the rigid artifice of theatrical backdrops, Ruckhaberle’s billboard-scale canvas approaches painting as a vaudevillian construction: a clichéd scene consciously exposing its own formulaic aspirations. Mixing techniques between naïve stylisation and impassioned gesture, Plakatwand is tinged with both humour and pathos. Ruckhaberle pictures the artist/vagabond as a comitragic figure, an idealistic bohemian crippled beneath the proliferation of mass-produced imagery and commercial message. Christoph Ruckhaberle approaches this canvas as several paintings in one: independent territories of brick, sky, wall, figure, become compressed to a single claustrophobic plane. From this referential abstraction, Ruckhaberle poses his painting as a romantically fatalist yet classically spectacular production.