Return to Sender

Return to Sender, 2023

Tino Bors, Daniel Walcher

727 x 272 cm;
Used engine oil and ash on 145 g/m2 paper.

As the backbone for “Return to Sender”, the typological investigation of the global shipping and delivery industry serves as an expedient to parallelize the infrastructure surrounding both prehistoric cave-paintings and contemporary shopping, shipping and delivery services.

Borrowing the visual language found in hunting and gathering scenes painted in caves, the larger-than-life earthy orange paper accommodates on its surface a black mixture of shipping waste products – engine oil and ash – representing sceneries filled with accidents pertaining delivered and to-be-delivered goods, i.e. all that contingently belongs to the delivery system.
In a narrative direction, massively loaded airplanes, zeppelins, ships, trucks and vans entering the far-left end of the painting, are mirrored on the right side by empty vehicles alongside herds of empty shopping carts. Various shipping methods and modes of transportation are depicted while masses of human beings swarm and crawl, in an almost cultic fashion, towards central figures, either working or holding the much coveted boxes containing the objects of desire.

The intention behind using the product of burning used and disposed cardboard boxes for the painting lies in their journey from and as box to ash. While ash functions as the pigment component, the vehicle of the oil-paint consists of combusted engine oil that had been previously used by cars and trucks. The shipping journey was imprinted on the ash before being used in this painting as the carrier of information referring to itself visually, narratively, and as informed surfaces. From medium to medium as medium. The oil then permeates the paper beneath it, slowly destroying it over time.