The Magican, 2011
Oil, Spray on Canvas
200 x 170 cm
Courtesy of Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin
LEA ASJA PAGENKEMPER
The Lover and The Magican
29 October - 30 November 2011
Opening: 28 October, 2011, 6-10pm
“Extreme licence wedded with a joking mood is accompanied by a refusal to take the underlying truth of eroticism seriously: by seriously I mean tragically.” (Georges Bataille)
The exhibition “The Lover and the Magician” presents the latest works by Baselitz master student L. A. Pagenkemper. Her paintings focus on symbolically charged landscapes which, beyond any realistic illusionism, are committed to moments that lyrically render the atmosphere.
Pagenkemper’s paintings surprise viewers through the emphasis placed on the fleeting quality of the transparent colors and through the shadowless trees, animals and figures that look as if they want to flee the stagnation or dangerously close collapse of an established social order that is still in place. The new compositions are particularly harmonious since they are designed around a central subject. For example, the focus is on a tree, a magician, a pair of lovers, a cottage. These forms successively emerge from the network of large curved lines and areas of color that are hardly differentiated from one another, that seem to endlessly merge into one another. A way of painting that is related to surrealism’s “écriture automatique,” Pagenkemper’s painting often presents disrupted, reduced passages, which, having emerged from the spontaneity of the act of painting, appear like gestures on the canvas. The immediate and purist approach to form and color gives the images their open and associative structures: on the one hand, figurative forms symbiotically bond in the abundance of organic forms in the whole image and, on the other hand, these forms preserve their corporeal presence through the autonomous quality of the painting style and color in the image.
The artist places iconic elements from daily life in utopian landscapes. This is done to symbolically present human situations of love and Eros, magic and disillusion, excess and decay. In addition to these references to the painting of a Munch or Gauguin, Pagenkemper’s simplified and original manner of representation discloses a quest for expression and feeling that resists the deceptive illusionism of (media) reality, to ultimately put forth a different option, that of a changed subjectivity.
Similar trends can currently be found in the music, literature and theater scenes: Staging emotional transgressions or incidents where everyday feelings like love, hate and despair are hurt is a way to ensure that a situation will be dynamic, that it will provoke feelings of irritation for the recipient.
Through the simplified methods of painting she employs, Pagenkemper’s inner intention seems to be to want to leave the space of the painting, to offer a true art of the gesture. In the style of Georges Bataille, the artist stages the motifs of love and fear in terms of an aesthetic that transgresses notions of form and boundary and in place of the nothingness of the possibilities in the media age, she puts forth an aesthetic of an overextended self. It is precisely in the tense area of prohibitions and their transgression that the rebellious dissolution of the ego and the experience of being beside oneself is made possible, on “that path that leads to the transforming of a prohibition’s principle, of necessary and mandatory decencies, into uncomprehending hypocrisy, into a lack of understanding for what is at stake.”
GALERIE JETTE RUDOLPH
Strausberger Platz 4
D- 10243 Berlin
T: +49 (0)-30- 613 03 887
GALERIE JETTE RUDOLPH
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