CONCEPT

Luncheon on the Grass

Graphite and blood on paper

150 x 220 cm

2011

CONCEPT

Modern man suffers from his existence. In order to bring his living environment under control, he constantly optimises himself with the greatest possible effort. He shapes his surroundings, tries to make sense of his undertakings, but permanently overtaxes himself under the given possibilities of his creative powers. Technical progress offers him an abundance of possibilities to shape and determine his individual life path, but denies him the guarantee of ultimate satisfaction resulting from his continuous restlessness. In order to break out of this vicious circle, he has created an illusory world that partially puts him off. For reality is the ugly betrayal of our desires and dreams. Having to endure this circumstance is the real tragedy of man.

While Friedrich Nietzsche describes art as the actual metaphysical activity of man [1], thus only in aesthetics does life appear justified, the course of the progress of knowledge culminates today in the question: What is the use of aesthetics, harmony and beauty in a world of discord of every conceivable kind? Our discomfort with our culture is confronted with our limited perception, which is moreover shrouded in the supposed creation of meaning. The world of wishful thinking that we have painted in colourful and screaming fashion, more like Disneyland than Plato's world of ideas, does not redeem us from contingency, the simple non-necessity of everything that exists.

Yet the market for all kinds of survival strategies is flourishing: there is no shortage of ideologies, parties, schools of thought, advertising slogans, ministerial decisions. Society is drowning in a flood of images, soundscapes, consumer goods. Sedatives and stimulants offer just as much guidance as insurance policies and laws to protect the citizen. Doesn't it seem that we can choose at will what we want, desire and hope for in order to be able to deal with all the adversities of life, to make everything even faster, more beautiful, more comfortable, in other words: to become sustainably happy?

But unfortunately, this colourful survival package of illusions does not work as we imagine. Our discomfort is expressed in the fact that we believe our relative perception to be the absolute truth. Our interpretations and explanations of what is real are reality in our eyes: that is the illusion we fall prey to, that is our real problem. This is where my art comes in.

[1] Preface to Richard Wagner in his work "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music", 1872

THEDISILLUSIONMENTOFTROMPEL'ŒIL

In my paintings I offer the beholder at the same time more and less than other artists. The angle from which my work can be perceived and the active process of seeing are of central importance to my artistic activity.

No other organ describes the interface to the perceptible world with such existential urgency as the eye. What we visually comprehend is measured by its impression. Who sees, what is seen, from where is it seen? The gaze is based, as can be concluded from the psychic economy of seeing, on recognition, not on cognition: "To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful." [1] This Neoplatonic view, which was effective in intellectual history up to German Idealism, was shattered in the 20th century, both under the impact of humanitarian crises and against the background of immense technological progress.

No other sensory organ has been aided as much as the eye by a multitude of optical devices: cameras, microscopes, telescopes, digital and electronic recording devices, screens and, more recently, even a science for critically examining the modes of representation of computer images. These devices and methods of investigation, it is generally assumed, serve a better, especially a more precise perception. In detail, they only continue what the eye already does: To form sections and to endow them with meaning. Jacques Lacan puts it as follows: "In our relation to things, as it arises in the way of seeing and is arranged in the figures of the image, something slides, passes by, is passed on from stage to stage, in order to be omitted in each case to a certain degree - this is precisely what is called the gaze." [2] This philosophical consideration of post-visuality, which epistemologically substantiates the optical deception in subject and object, has the consequence that we can make new arrangements at will and in this way intensify the wealth of variations in deceptions to reach a new form of topicality.

I do not only want to problematise the rich stock of images in human consciousness, but in its mode of recognition I want to show the references patterns that guide us in our cultural activities. Selected examples accompany my artistic work in this process of perception: passing images (movements), "invisible" images (memories), dream images (psyche), superimpositions of history and the present (recognition effect of familiar social and historical models), moments of everyday life that are recorded by the brain with the help of the eye but not usually stored in memory - they are accorded special significance. I draw optimally from the fact that these perceptions are an illusion created by the human mind, as by depicting them, in a far-reaching sense, it makes possible a return of what has already taken place or existed. In the form of reproducing paintings of historical models in familiar, modern contexts, I make visible what has already taken place, but must nevertheless be reinvented by the mind.

At the same time, an increased amount of information when looking at a picture often leads to a loss of unambiguity. The relationship of what is depicted to the viewer's expectations is generally like that of a mirage, an illusion. The example of Velázquez' "Las Meninas" is considered a classic example of inexhaustible art interpretation. Has the painting been prepared for us as viewers or is it presented as the view of a world that exists independently of us and to which we are only admitted as casual observers? My alienation pushes into a different space of significant perception, similar to a scene from Steven Spielberg's film "Schindler's List", in which a little girl wanders through the streets of a black-and-white movie in a bright red coat.

[1] Plotinus, Enneads, Sixth Book, Ch.9

[2] Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, first published by Éditions du Seuil in 1973, first English publication in 1977.

MISUNDERSTANDINGS | TYPECLASSIFICATIONANDSOCIALSTRUCTURES

In my paintings I deal with the problem of image illusion and the illusion of reality. My works testify to the impossibility of being able to represent reality objectively, because each person experiences so-called "reality" as his or her own reality in an individually different way, whereby the perception of the perceiving person at a given moment is guided by a variable number of external influences of diverse intensity.

Every society is based on a broad consensus of self-created realities. Therefore, in the face of completely individual perceptions of reality, human striving for group identification is inevitably a permanent source of interpersonal conflict. An anthropological constant of our presence is the fact that we do not want to lose our standing in the gaze of the other. Those who want to see first do so at the risk of being seen first. The broad field of Eros, libido and nudity has this issue as its theme. In this confrontation, behavioural structures are revealing, in which humans instinctively create possibilities of expression that reveal their vulnerability and weakness rather than guidance or orientation. By providing his/her environment with his/her own laws, the individual tries to delimit his/her surroundings, thus defining his/her own place in it and establishing clearly interpretable rules. The more complex, the freer a society, the greater its own contradictions and the easier it is to question the rules it has created for itself. Defamiliarising familiar interpretations of images is therefore an important part of my work. I look at events, even processes, that clearly do not fit into our learned patterns of behaviour and lie outside our conventions as a possibility to show distortions and disturbances that can cause intentional confusion and alienation. This also includes borderline situations of human endurance as well as contradictions and misunderstandings arising from survival strategies within a complex consumer society.

Together with the individual perceptual reality, the illusion is complete and the idea of a generally valid truth becomes the perfect deception of society.

ETERNITYCULT

Human despair in the face of the transience of existence forms another focus of my work. In this context, I am particularly interested in the results of the inexhaustible efforts by humans to fight against the ephemeral nature of things. Since meaning-constituting thinking is doomed to failure, its religious legitimacy is at least questionable and somehow disenchanted, the question of contingency therefore becoming more urgent than ever. In order to fight against impermanence, humans have developed strategies to hold on to the things that escape their memory - indeed, must escape in the flood of associations on offer in which humanity might get lost.

Starting from traditional means of expression and a reservoir of photographs as a pool of themes, I have worked out a relationship between the selected materials, the overall composition and their pictorial themes. They reflect the contradiction between the transience of all living things and the futile effort to store our memories in order to save them from oblivion. Using a wide variety of mostly fragile materials (paper, blood, glass), I try to work out individuality, but also the transient character of our memories.

A painting automatically risks the impossible, because the perfect work of art is the one that will never exist. That is why in my paintings I try to give shape to the crisis of humanity in its search for meaning, to offer a way of reconciliation between humans and art, between subject and object. If the contemplation of the past is often romantically transfigured, because the ruins of great architecture remind us of our transience and yet enchant us, the sensationalist view of the catastrophes of our world is the perverted reverse of this. In this trade-off within a stretched time span, my art tries to accompany the viewer both critically and favourably.