More than ever before, I cannot resist the insistent impression that in Xénie Hoffmeister's paintings from the Repositories and Containers series we are looking at the naked reality of the historical situation of today. For all their imaginative vagueness of plot and scale, the view from the tram window of the teeming everyday seems far more surreal, far more defiant of sober reason than the image of a dark tower over an abyss and graves alive with atomic ghosts. The scene seen from public transport deceives us in many ways, for in its ordinariness it tries to claim that nothing is happening, even though we are in an unprecedented era of multiple crises affecting everything from the elemental code of shared language in families to the stability of the planetary biosphere.

But Xenia Hoffmeister goes further, her paintings warning us not only against escaping into the paralyzing complacency of the mundane, but also against escaping into the naivety of simple solutions to lived crises. For the naivety we so readily and unwittingly cling to in an attempt to make (and control) "our" world more transparent produces simplistic diagnoses and instant answers, including those that masquerade as "inconvenient truths" but are more likely just reactive reversals of existing orders. An elephant standing on its head is still an elephant. To look around honestly may be to see that we are lost in a labyrinth of more or less reliable information, stories, and contexts intertwined by the will of powerful interests: we do not know how to even recognize where we are in the maze, and what the ground rules are for any purposeful movement through its corridors.

It seems premature to think of a way out, because we have not yet charted either the extent or the depth of our own ignorance. Not only premature, but dangerous. The tragic figures of minor characters in the author's landscapes may wander helplessly, but that certainly does not stop them from waving their spears around; on the contrary, they fight with all their might for what is surely a very noble cause. That is why they are so tragic: they do not know that they do not know. With that, they lose their chance to be actors with the hope of overcoming their situation and become a passive part of the landscape, its (armed) monsters.

The scale and basic forms of the author's paintings allow us to begin mapping the structure of the situation in the labyrinthine world. As much as we are not given coherent answers that can be translated into a political manifesto, we learn, for example, to see that the centre of the landscape is a tower towering imposingly above everything else. We do not know who built it or why, or the nature of the power through which it holds sway over its surroundings. But we do know that we cannot do without an appropriate answer in the search for a way out of the critical situation, or else we will continue to flounder on the rocks to which the jocular fan of the beacon-towers guides us. The scenes of the paintings are full of diverse containers: boxes, cabinets and graves, containers and servers of sorts, their characteristic features interpenetrating each other. The concealment of the essential, the opening of the sealed or the resurrection of the buried represent key processes to be noticed.

The dimension of techno-digitization of this space and the silos of the flow of information, communication, and therefore relationships are prominent. Their medium and content is the pulsing signal of the algorithm encoding in the bowels of the black box stored in the black tower. And that must - at least for now - be enough for us. Such is also the nature of the "realism" of the author's landscapes; we know only this much and that much, nothing more. But what we are shown appears to be a reliable basis. The reliability of these observations is also the source of the strange calm that Xenia Hoffmeister's otherwise disturbing paintings can be. We know (a little better) where we stand, and that gives us a chance not to become monsters. And perhaps there is another level of "realism" in these paintings that has less to do with their social commentary.

The beauty of her descriptive quality lies in the accuracy of her depiction of our experience of the present. This is how we feel when we peruse the news, when we watch a block of television commercials, when we overhear snippets of conversation from the next table in horror, when we wonder at two in the morning how we're going to make it through it all. Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1930 from prison that "the old world is dying and a new world is trying to be born: now is the time of the monsters". Even then it was not just a social commentary, but a kind of psychological probe into the consequences of experiencing a historical turning point or crisis. In the world of Xenia Hoffmeister's paintings, the analysis of the turning point may ultimately be secondary, but this is certainly how one can feel when monsters are born out of groping.