Katalog - Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie

value the ‘normalities’ that surround us actually are. Diedrich Diederichsen very pre­
cisely traced this aspect within the framework of his study of the link between Mini­
malism and Pop in reference to the stateside LSD culture of the early and mid­1960s:
“You go back to the suburban family homestead and look at the coffee grinder, an
ashtray or the kitchen clock and burst into laughter. This chuckle at the coffee grind­
er is a result of our sudden ability to extract it from the functional suburban kitchen
complex and see it as a decontextualized, ‘pure’ object.” 1 Or like Love’s gifted frontman
and proven psychedelic expert Arthur Lee lyricized: “go turn on your tub / and
it’s mixed with mud.” 2 Or the milk from Harry Smith’s milk carton that, oh wonder,
is transformed into — would you believe it — milk…
For about two years now the Düsseldorf artist Cornelius Quabeck has been occupied
in his painting with the ideologically amply ‘impastoed’ surfaces of the psychedelic,
as on view. Offhand, this should be surprising. For up to now Quabeck seemed mostly
interested in the hands­on problem of concretization.
If in his past painting series he was, so to speak, engaged from a homage­based angle
with famous rock guitarists of the past three decades (2006) or with Hollywood
stars of a bygone era (2002/2008), the problem then seemed to me to entail, first
and foremost, his wanting to track down his own fascination with the respective object
assisted by the thematic and technical arsenal needed for the series — including
the inherent restriction of form and medium — and at the same time to keep it
at bay. The fact that these works — counterbalanced more between (brush/charcoal)
drawings and coloraturas, more collaged or fake­batiked than decisively ‘painted’
works — were trimmed down to a damn narrow pathway (namely formwise between
craving and style, contentwise between a safe distance and entanglement)
could only do all the more good. Besides, what stood these paintings in good stead
was the fact that Quabeck seemed in any case to be much more interested in the
subject instead of including the process of painting itself as the theme.
In this sense, however, the contrast to Quabeck’s most recent works could hardly
be any sharper. The very deliberately staged distance in the former paintings can
now, in an only relativizing way, be the case here. On the one hand, added to a thickened
undefined swirl of a psychedelically ambiguous picture plane comes, on the other,
various painting idioms that prod the surface and compete for attention. As though
hidden behind semi­transparent curtains or veils of fog, the most varied thematic
and semantic layers resonate. Some of this is familiar to us from previous work by
the artist — above all that curious bestiary of dodos and monkeys for which Quabeck
has long had a soft spot. Often hardly more than a contour, in other places literally
dismembered into particles and fragments, this illusionistically overheated tropical
zoo is, for its part, in competition with phenomena that obviously belong to another
order. Which are indefinable, optical phenomena: flashes of iridescent lights, showers
of bright sparks or explosions of dynamic reflexes emitted from the picture plane;
in all, phenomena that suggest a kind of overall allusion­and­illusion­rich exhilaration.
To attribute this traditional, art­historical competition to a conflict between abstraction
and figurativeness is perhaps just as safe as it is boring. Superficially it does describe
the factors operative in paintings such as “Alpha” or in the quite obvious title
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