| Neo Rauch | Artefact and
Labour |
 |
| Neo Rauch has a crisp, clear drawing
style, flashy brushwork and a subdued palate
which he uses to create haunting images
featuring schematic figures ensconced in an
improbable universe. These settings are at once
familiar and strange. David Ebony (artnet) |
 |
| Neo Rauch is a painter. For him, this
seemingly casual definition entails a certain
programmatic defiance, a quality which was unheard of in
former decades, seemed obsolete under Conceptualism, and
which now, after waIting up to the general 'invalidity'
of art, harbours a fresh lease of hope. However, this
assessment is in danger of implying an age old scepticism
toward the so-called `new technologies' as long as the
particular style of painting we are discussing remains
undefined. Without causing a great din in the process,
adhering to traditional virtues of his trade and with a
pronounced narrative will, Rauch is at work on the
specifically 1990s notion of the Image. Although his
subject matter seems clear, his works function as
ambivalent signals from a disturbing realm beyond. They
do not resist definition yet never expose themselves
fully. They seem to be suspended in a world parallel to
normal sensory experience, memory and dream, attaining
this state through a process of gradual saturation. Using
tiny sketches as an impetus, Rauch delineates the
contours of the depicted scene directly onto the canvas,
thereafter letting himself be guided by the intrinsic
demands of the image. What he is clearly aiming at is an
interplay of formal stringency with painterly liberation
of a high standard. This oscillation is occasionally
known to generate an intuitive trance of sorts. Rauch
performs his aesthetic experiment, which perhaps
resembles a great puzzle, by stratifying diverse
pictorial insertions with a perspectival playfulness,
interweaving fragments of words and images abounding in
texture and detail. Significantly, in so doing, Rauch is
primarily intent on responding to the compositional
problems the image poses, content and subject-matter
being subordinate. In this respect, Neo Rauch is no
representational painter. Harald Kunde, “Artefact and
Labour” |
 |
|
|
|
|
Peter Doig & Michael Raedecker Peter Doig & Udomsak Krisanamis Peter Doig Marlene Dumas |