Durch Rauch gesehen - Galerie EIGEN+ART

68 WOLFGANG BÜSCHER 2005 2006 ARTUR LUBOW
69
the man-made industrial urban infrastructure,
the natural landscape, and the
inner realm of fantasy and dreams. In
spaces that are both fragmented and
timeless, Rauch has created a vision that
embodies enigmatic statements about
the phenomenal world in which we exist,
and the multiple and hidden layers
of significance that lie beyond the superficial
surfaces of things. His monumental
figures are both of this world and
yet strangely alien, and his art is as much
about what is seen as what is not seen.
(…) Ultimately we are presented in
Rauch’s work with the ontological discontinuities
and conflicts inherent in the
human condition. His images are compelling
because they brazenly question
the relevance of transmitted wisdom and
the status quo, and as such have the
power of Zen koans — questions that
have no logical answer.
STEPHEN LITTLE
Neo Rauch. Works 1994–2002, Die Sammlung
der Leipziger Volkszeitung, (cat.)
Honolulu Academy of Arts; Woodstock
2005.
German Motifs
Where do these images come from?
There are situations, he says, which
increase their frequency. “Moments of
physical exhaustion. Mild fever — although
I haven’t experienced that for
decades.” These days, it is walks in the
forest. “There in the underbrush is a
picture in the corner of my eye.”
He calls them images from our collective
archive. “And of course I have to
form them, bring them home for my
stable. That’s just how Rauch’s pictures
happen.” We start talking about dreams.
He says he’s worried that they are losing
the power of images. “But a few of them
force their way through.”
He glances around. “At night, I often
visit a farmhouse where I sleep in a
room at the end of a long corridor. I always
have luggage problems, I’m always
just ready to leave, I’m always asking
myself: Is all my gear ready for when it’s
time to leave? He could be fleeing or
advancing. He tries to paint it, but it
slips through his fingers. “I am always
certain that I will get there sometime.
Or that I have already been there. I
could build a model of that farm — that’s
how well I know it.”
Night has fallen. The high factory
window in his studio is now made up
of small, almost blind mirrors. They reflect
a twenty by twenty meter room.
Underneath six double neon tubes are
a stretcher covered in white, (…) two
powerful speakers, a table, stacked high
with CDs. Pop. White Stripes. New
stuff. A wild boar’s jawbone, found in
the forest. Paint buckets and dried blobs
of paint everywhere, he mixes his colors
on the floor, on plastic plates from the
take-away Chinese. And looking at the
man himself, with his once-pale trousers,
you can see that painting is real
work, and how appropriate his word for
it is: my stable.
He still lives where he was born in
1960: in Leipzig. Sometimes, in daydreams,
he feels as if he still has a task to
complete here. The next thought brings
on a bit of head-shaking: “My father
studied at the college at which I have
now become a professor.”
He lives in a magnetic field that could
be lifted straight from one of his paintings.
The factory: atomized worlds,
whose demolished inhabitants he carefully
leads into his studio — thus he once
described it. His house: pointy-roofed,
as he likes to stress, built in 1931. He
and his wife found it a few years ago.
“It’s a rather dull area. But it was our
house. It was waiting for us.”
He says that this region — this flat
land between the mountain ranges of
the Harz and the Erzgebirge, ground
into shape by its industrial, wartime,
and long East German history — provides
him with all the nutrients he is in
need of. He says, literally, “...that I am
in need of.” He formulates as he speak.
It is the undeniable determination to
not use jargon. He never uses jargon.
His No Logo! means: No slang. Talk is
not a nice sound that can be allowed to
stop. It’s not important that people
chatter without a break. That is quite
pleasant. It makes time for quiet thought.
“No,” he says. “I’m not a nomad. No
wild escapism.”
On the wall is a new large-format, still
quite raw. “An embryo, started today.”
A greenish window; behind it it’s dark,
and light in front.
“What’s it going to be?”
“Our situation right now. Two people,
an interview. Carried out with the cobweb
of caution and the armor of desire.”
An Ernst Jünger quote. That is how
Jünger described his reluctance to do
interviews. A kind of conversation that
never takes off because two people are
simply watching each other.
Rauch calls Jünger a fatherly friend.
“I owe him a lot. He took a direct hand
in my work in the early 90s. When I was
in danger of sinking into a kind of semiabstract
commonplace space and becoming
like a thousand Sunday painters.
When I was trying to find out what really
characterizes me, he was a guiding
voice.”
His stereoscopic view. His that-istrue-and-so-is-this.
His phenomenological
quality, his analytical sharpness.
“It seems to me that Jünger sees the
world from the inside of a crystal.”
We talk about irony. You really only
need to look Neo Rauch in the face to
see that he knows all about it. There’s
something about the mouth, almost intangible,
but always there. In the art
world, the call for irony is anything but
intangible. There is the ironical comment.
And the vague impression that
this painter — thinking of his own protection
— may not be too unhappy when
his art is categorized as ironic. Of course,
what else? But is it really?
He responds defensively. “There is
irony in it. Yes, I am ironical. But I’m
not cynical. Not a nihilist.” No, hardly.
Nihilists don’t get on their bikes first
thing in the morning and ride twenty
kilometers from Markkleeberg to the
factory in Plagwitz, paint until midday,
cook lunch, paint until evening, and cycle
home. Nor do they work in the garden
at the weekend. All this may be just
camouflage, a protective shell around
his private life. But nor is it an act. The
playfulness is much too serious.
“Some things are surrounded by a
washable curtain of irony. Things that
move me deeply, but which, if I were to
put them on display, would go into the
realm of kitsch.”
Thus, the problem of irony is in the art
itself. And it’s related to the kitsch problem.
Any art that is created only with the
firm intention of never being caught in
flagrante with cousin kitsch would be
stiff, unadventurous, boring. It is a question
of sovereignty and of the dose. It’s
easy to make a mistake.
“I’m quite clear on this. I know I operate
in the borderline areas, where
shots can be fired and there is an everpresent
danger of losing myself in talk.
But that’s what the artist has to do — risk
danger. The Modern as the final state
and desirable aim — that is a German
misunderstanding.”
WOLFGANG BÜSCHER
Deutsche Motive (German Motifs), Die
Zeit, 1 December 2005, pp. 65– 66.
The New Leipzig
School
Indeed, Rauch constructs his paintings
like a theater director, first daubing in
the backdrops. “It is important to create
a definite environment or stage on which
things can happen,” he says. “For me,
the function of painting as I understand
it is to work with myths. I try to create a
widespread system where impulses are
trapped. With an analytic understanding,
you can’t grasp it.” He hastens to
clarify that he does not indulge in “psychological
automatism.” He begins with
a general notion of the mood and subject
of the painting. “Having set the fundamentals,
the stage, I introduce the actors
on the stage,” he explains. “Then it
happens — when I set the inhabitants
into a relation, I am not able to plan. In
between the figures, and in between the
figures and me, subtle relations start to
be created. A microclimate comes into
being.” Rauch blends rigorous precision
with foggy mysticism, a brew that is very
German. “It seems to me that I am
drawn back further and further, that elements
from distant periods are knocking
on the door and want to be let in,”
he says. “That is also reflected in my
dreams, that I am drawn back to earlier
Leporello, 2005, oil on canvas, 98½ × 82⅝ in ⁄ 250 × 210 cm