Neo Rauch
"Neo Rauch" by John Kissick, Winter 2007, pp. 95-96
Writing about the German painter Neo Rauch is roughly akin to dissecting the football genius of David Beckham: mountains of chatter and gush to negotiate, almost none of which gets you closer to the essential enigma of the work, or why we are so enamoured.
Perhaps it is our desire for something unknowable or indescribable, a foil to a world seemingly devoid of mystery, that can make an image of, say, a doe-eyed young Werther with Mickey Mouse inflato-hands clutching a rustically attired, honey-I-shrunk-the-kids mini-me to his bosom so interesting (it’s a self-portrait of Rauch holding his father). I’m not kidding. Rauch’s painting fits neatly into a particular contemporary mindset that finds its own amusement, if not quite eloquence, in the re-sorting of 20th-century cultural detritus—the more nostalgic and clichéd, the better. And boy, does he know how to pick ’em—social realism and surrealism! These conventions—immediately recognizable and ideologically saturated (and throw in Balthus for good measure)— almost beg you to wander down this art-historical path to interpretative redemption. The only problem is that in Rauch’s case, it’s a labyrinth and you can’t find a way out! Don’t get me wrong—being trapped in meaninglessness isn’t such a terrible thing. In fact, it might be the point of the whole exercise.
At its best, Rauch’s work is both delightfully virtuosic and seriously empty. His exhibition at the Met, entitled “para” (parallel, paradox, paranormal, etc.), features 14 new paintings (all 2007) by the prolific Leipzig artist and educator. While maddeningly compelling, they also thwart even the most rudimentary narrative interpretation. Rauch offers pure visual theatre, full of props and costumes with strange effects of light and scale and atmosphere— everything except a plot line. His players—blotchy and comatose-looking peasant stock (Soviet, ca. 1930) mildly reminiscent of doped-up East German swim-team members (Montreal, ca. 1976)—have all the sensuality of Formica and angst of Michael Bublé. They are mannequins encapsulating a time and place that is both psychologically distant and historically close, and their vague familiarity only further frustrates
To say that Rauch’s paintings are odd is nothing new. Figuring out why is a different matter. Much has been written on the debt his work owes to a variety of 20th-century figurative traditions, but what makes the paintings so interesting is how Rauch actually constructs them. There is none of the compositional planning and underpainting that underpins the narrative rigour of social realism or the visual punchlines of surrealism. Instead, at the level of procedure, the artist employs methods often associated with expressionism, where the painter finds the work through the act of painting it, rather than executing a specific plan. Rauch, God love him, just starts painting, adding stuff as he sees fit and painting out what he doesn’t want.
This is the antithesis—formally and ideologically—of everything social realism has historically stood for, and the resulting brew neatly collapses its rhetorical strategies into an optically compelling, if confounding, whole. Like the best visual mischief, Rauch’s work floats and shrinks and spins in unexpected, delightfully anarchic ways. The sheer inventiveness of the paintings and their purposeful inversion of expectations deny the viewer easy passage into the securities of storytelling. Instead, the figures float. They are like moments or gestures, at times glomming onto neighbours to create a spark of potential meaning, but all the while indifferent to anyone who would try to make sense of it all.
If, as the artist suggests, this is what his dreams are like, all I can say is: yikes!
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