Neo Rauch

Neo Rauch’s paintings are hauntingly fractal. But not in the ways one might conveniently expect. They are representational rather than abstract and make much of their own containment without becoming claustrophobic. The “self-similar” forms in his paintings (whether hockey players or slugs) remind us that, here, shape is itself the wiliest of all protagonists.

Rauch is a painter of infinite detail. The creation of a fractal often begins with a simple shape that is then successively replicated, resulting in inordinately complex structures. The fractal process is instigated in the optic of the viewer. The illustrative vignettes in his paintings are complex and capture the imagination so that we try to hook them up to a wider context not itself present, duplicating them outside the frame in order to fix them in their place. The artefacts, protagonists and bystanders Rauch paints read as relating to this wider frame of reference, which is, of course, literally unavailable. What of the world that continues outside the painter’s frame? So enigmatic is a painting’s content, and so fraught with strange intimacy, we are empowered to imagine the wider cosmos from whence they derive.

The isolated vignettes ignite an imaginal fuse in sundry frames of mind. We are haunted as much by what we see as by what remains unseen. These paintings are like stage sets imported from the former GDR, but they are intended to discourage solipsistic thinking. We are always looking towards the wings to see the action—the actor, Rauch— behind the scenes. In truth, Rauch’s swooping and often loopy imagery triggers fractal thinking in ways undreamt of by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.

In a painting like Hatz, 2002, with its team of flying hockey players that resembles a lunatic cabal of Stasi operatives of the former GDR in frenzied pursuit of a supersonic slug across the surface of a frozen pond, we glimpse the full array of Rauch’s gifts. The painting conflates a host of painting styles. The shapes of flying skaters may be limited to the icy arena, but they trigger replication in the imagination. As William Gass once argued, it is the arrangement of colours, rather than any one colour itself, that allows us to savour the mood it generates, whether sad reverie or epiphany. So it is with the greens and the whites in Hatz. The worm on the run in Hatz is clearly Rauch’s paint itself. This ultimate—and unlikely—protagonist eggs on the Bavarian-clad stand-ins for the painter himself, who appears inept. (At least one has seemingly expired.) Arguably, given his past in Leipzig, paint is Rauch’s sole defence and testimony against historical tyranny, oppression and myopia. And he uses it well. If you look closely at his paintings, you can hear Rauch secretly chuckling as his subversive tube-squeezed hero slips away, leaving only his pursuers in harm’s way.

A 46-year-old graduate of the Leipzig Academy in the former GDR, where he still lives, Rauch arguably always had an edge over the competition: the strange fugue state in which artists like him came up is far from vanquished in his work, but, rather, objectified there. This mood of the cloisters is still lovingly invested and preserved in every painting he executes, like some reliquary of lost time. He carries the past within him—the once-pervasive old-school Socialist Realism—and inflects it with a surreality and a truly adult dose of appropriated Americana that turn it on its head and he does so in a manner that is, moreover, wholly and uniquely his own.

When Neo Rauch’s parents were killed in a train crash, he was six months old, and his father had just entered art school, the Academy of Visual Arts, the very same school Rauch would graduate from so many years later (having written his Master’s thesis on West German abstract paintings of the 1950s). Already age 30 when the Berlin Wall fell, and well aware of the art worlds outside, he was poised to bring his past along with him, in paintings that feed on the illustrative detritus of art in the former GDR while embodying some of the most subversive thinking in art today, and possessing a barely concealed principle of hope.

Rauch’s narratives are lures and labyrinths and, in an important sense, red herrings. Why? Because his art is really all about the paint. Many of his commentators just don’t get this. The curious leeches, larvae, serpents and slugs that appear and reappear in his paintings are about procedural issues, but, most of all, pure paint. They always represent the iconic triumph of the physical materiality of pigment over what is represented there, haunting as it may be. Indeed, it might be suggested that the slug is a mnemonic lure, which leads us through the labyrinth of narratives to the Minotaur at its core, the paint itself.

Much critical currency has been printed from the sundry “isms” that are said to inhabit and shape Rauch’s work—I have already used a few here—but, in the presence of these paintings, and they do have a presence, it is perhaps better to jettison the “isms” altogether and let the moods of these paintings speak in their consummately eloquent voices, reflecting a sundered past and a present still unfurling. They generate a strange metonymic aura that is also very magnetic, drawing us in and holding us there, in the cradle of painting.

Rauch has a very deft way with his brush. He builds up a fine state of painterly fervour and then razors the excess away. And the razor, his tireless brush, eviscerates hypocrisy just as it always leaves supple and sensuous traces of pure pigment—the talismanic undertow of his practice.

Rauch is a virtuoso at embodying mood. Reflective, his protagonists seem to radiate a passive energy—but the painting itself is anything but passive. It buzzes with energy, the industry of paint, the business of a painter trying to reckon with one world lost and a new world not yet won. The hectic clamour of painting itself belies the curiously mute, illustrative personae of the paintings; Rauch’s improvisatory mien never allows the work to fall into stasis or solipsistic self-reverie. His work generates a sort of low-lying radiation that the Geiger counter of any sensitive psyche attuned to the right wavelength can detect. And if we listen hard enough, we break in on Rauch’s own “racing thoughts,” the symptom of a painting mania in which the painter experiences swiftly changing and uncontrollable ideas and tries to make them gel and cohere and emit, without necessarily taming them, in paint on canvas.

In Lösung, 2005, one of Rauch’s most important paintings to date, a huge, bearded figure wrestles with a very agitated worm/serpent/ slug. Notably, the latter is marked with a series of letters spelling “Solution.” Suggestive and literal at once, this is Rauch at his most autobiographical and revealing. For we are looking at the painter Neo Rauch, wrestling with his pigment—the painter depicting himself in a life-or-death struggle with his art. As he tries to manhandle the pigment into submission (the outcome is not yet obvious), the question is: Has he whipped it or will pigment triumph over him? The intended answer is, of course, both. He is the hostage, and maybe martyr, to his paint but he still has his way with it. A happy stalemate means paintings that stay with us and augur well for a truly open future still to come. ■

“Neo Rauch” was exhibited at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal from September 14, 2006, to January 7, 2007.

James D. Campbell is a writer and curator based in Montreal.