Disturbing Pleasures
Dan Tranberg
Neo Rauch, Prozession, 2004, Oil on paper, 103 1/8 x 78 inches. Private Collection.
The tremendously appealing exhibition "From Leipzig’’ at the Cleveland Museum of Art features seven lusciously executed large-scale works that revel in the use of painting as pure absurdist theatre. Rich with conflicting symbols and diverse modes of representation, each work becomes a complex visual puzzle, which in turn leads to an endless string of seemingly unanswerable questions.
The game of trying to figure out each painting becomes increasingly enjoyable as shadows point nonsensically in different directions, figures appear to be walking across a sand dune yet leave no footprints, and everyday objects are rendered in conflicting ways that constantly remind us of both the power and the fallibility of the visual clues that inform our sense of space. All of this simultaneously suggests both a reaffirmation of the potential of painting and a rather bleak view of whole process as little more than skillful, intelligent shenanigans.
Curated by Jeffrey Grove shortly before he left the museum to become curator of modern and contemporary art at the High Museum in Atlanta, the show features one work each by Neo Rauch, Tilo Baumgärtel, Tim Eitel, Martin Kobe, Christoph Ruckhäberle, David Schnell, and Matthias Weischer, all of whom studied in recent years at the Leipzig Academy. At age 44, Rauch is the eldest of the group by a decade. The notion that these artists’ collective activities can be regarded as a school may be a romantic one, but the impact and strange cohesiveness of their enigmatic works make the idea both seductive and believable.
This effect is made all the more poignant by the location of the exhibition within the museum. Nestled in the relatively small project room and surrounded by works from the permanent collection that have come to be strongly identified with either modernism or postmodernism, the paintings of the Leipzig group clearly draw from a wide spectrum of painting movements, suggesting an entirely fluid relationship between art historical periods. For them, the act of borrowing and juggling diverse motifs becomes a delightful game in which the viewer is constantly reminded that painting is not a mirror, but rather a self-referential world of the artist’s creation.
In the end, we are reminded of how painting functions, how systems of signification are invented and used, and how we as viewers become seduced by the painter’s reality. Perhaps more poignantly, we are faced with the idea that we are living in an era of profound ambivalence. The process of making this realization through these artists’ brilliantly executed works is strangely enjoyable and, ultimately, difficult to shake.
