Encounter with Neo Rauch and his art: This is not reactionary, this is a miracle!
How can a man dig so deeply into his heart with his work? An encounter with Neo Rauch and his paintings in Leipzig.
Anyone who stands before Neo Rauch senses a kindness that is as attractive as a magnetic field. One encounters not a man who is angry, who wants to take out his critics, but rather a subtle brooding man, despairing of the world and whose thoughts and feelings are running against what we like to call reality.
When he stands before you, this painter from Leipzig, a not all that tall man, but at the same time one of the greatest painters of the past and present, a giant, enormous in his importance in the art world, the representative of the New Leipzig School, one of the most important German painters of all time, and later walks tenderly and thoughtfully through his light-flooded studio, in which motes of dust glide sparkling through the sunbeams, pensively pondering and looking skeptical, then you cannot help but believe that this so-called public opinion, this brutal opinion, especially in Germany, with its image of the brittle Neo Rauch, has fallen victim to a huge misunderstanding.
Yes, what if Neo Rauch feels and sees something we don't see, but which we feel just as he does? What if he—let's call it the visionary power of art—reflects something to us that keeps us awake at night and sometimes even causes us to despair during the day? A malaise that spreads and materializes in Neo Rauch's pictures, shining forth like a force of nature, suddenly visible and tangible, rearing up before us like the "it" from the soul that, in these pictures, no longer knows how to contain itself and now irretrievably, irresistibly throws us off course? If that were the case, then Neo Rauch would merely be the channel for a certainty, for an irrefutable realization that testifies to the transience of time, that frightens us, and that we have nothing to blame for, not Neo Rauch, but ourselves.
These tremendous works by Neo RauchI don't recognize anything reactionary in Neo Rauch. I recognize in Neo Rauch a man who has a hard time dealing with the idiocy of a reality laden with clichés. In his paintings, he slips into a sphere that turns away from cliché and immerses himself in a cosmos of unavoidable urgency, in which the past seems to rage like a storm, and which, as a storm, battles its way through the present into the future. And that hurts.
In the new exhibition in Leipzig entitled "Silent Reserve" at the Spinnerei in Leipzig, one experiences the art of Neo Rauch as a powerful protest against the triviality of our time. Of course, these are feelings that should not be universalized too strongly, nor cited to suit the needs of each individual viewer. And yet there seems to be a leitmotif that expresses skepticism towards the pale, stale, and unpretentious nature of the present – a present, incidentally, that seems to be falling apart in Neo Rauch's paintings, just as we ourselves do, sometimes at night, or now during the day, in front of these paintings, in front of these powerful works.
Anyone who cannot deal with Neo Rauch, who cannot endure these heart-piercing paintings, must face the question of whether they are equally unable to endure their own abysses. Who would blame whom? Dealing with the abyss takes strength, we know that, and Neo Rauch takes this strength for us. Anyone who does not understand this and brings Rauch into disrepute misunderstands him morally, drags his art down into the trivial – an art that seeks to distance itself from the profane and speaks a different, mystical language that we understand only intuitively, most strongly at night. No wonder Neo Rauch no longer wants to speak, no longer express himself, no longer about his attitudes, which have not changed, which have become firmly established like the aesthetic concept in his art, non-negotiable since the 1990s. That is courageous. That is attitude. That is what people have when they know how they are constituted. While some change, affected by the spirit of the times, yesterday pacifists, today militarists (or whatever), Neo Rauch remains true to himself, alone with his convictions and feelings, which, and this is the price, repeatedly give him sleepless nights.
But who can sleep well at night with everything that's happening, everything we experience and feel as a human being, today and every day? How can you even sleep in a world that spins so fast and generates so many horrific injustices and cruelties that it makes you dizzy? Sometimes the horrific in Neo Rauch's art is very present, colorful and striking: the fear that grips you when you lose control; the kick when you slip away from others, no longer have any footing, and fall into the abyss of time. That's madness. With Neo Rauch, one is reminded of the loss of control, of the incomprehensibility of the passage of time, and also of the unchangeable past that stalks you from behind in his works, unexpectedly and insidiously grabbing and striking, and from far away reaching deep into the naked present – and also tainting the future. And that is the real scandal, the fact that it is there and does not go away, this transience.
This must explain why Neo Rauch's scandalous works, especially his current works in this exhibition, draw the garish into the dark, as if one were besieging the other, suddenly infecting it, as if the verdict had long been passed. How is one supposed to endure this? Perhaps with a vodka in hand?
Neo Rauch possesses the hidden reserves to confront us with the power and strength of his thoughts in his art. The painting, which also gave its title to the Leipzig exhibition ("Silent Reserve," 2024, 250x300 cm), is a typical example of Rauch's arrogance in stabbing the unconscious. We see two men, dressed in historical uniforms, like military reservists, ramming a pole bearing a brightly lit St. Andrew's cross into the ground, devoting themselves to this task with such seriousness as if it were a matter of sheer survival. Go ahead, it's possible.
But what does this St. Andrew's cross mean, hanging in front of everyday level crossings to indicate the priority of rail traffic? Is it an allusion to the great smoke trauma, the train accident in which his parents died when he was just born? Who stands in front of this painting and doesn't think of death? Who doesn't think of loneliness? And who of the crucifixion of Christ? Perhaps the woman in the picture, who defies fate no less resolutely. The dark sky shines so gloomily, as if any rebellion would be in vain. Even the energy of the bright flash of lightning may not spread any hope, except perhaps that of the Final Judgment.
Brave people who can stand by themselvesCan one do anything but kneel before this art, which seems to touch an ether we can only guess at, which Neo Rauch knows how to tap into in his art as the bearer of a message that is never entirely clear to us and yet still unsettling, as a messenger whom one must not condemn? Condemn for what? For talent? For craftsmanship? For visions that hurt? And then he stands there again, Neo Rauch, in the studio, unwilling to explain himself, trusting that the pictures know more than he does, that they speak louder, much louder than he ever could, and testify that it is hubris to have a name for everything and everyone, to find a label, a title. And that's precisely the joke. That's for the stupid, all that postering and labeling, Rauch's art is supposed to free us from that, and it does so, as a powerful force that is much stronger than anything and everything, stronger than this great, meaningful "we," this society that is often unfair to those who have the courage to stay true to themselves.
Neo Rauch: Silent Reserve . Until July 5 at the Eigen+Art gallery in Leipzig-Plagwitz, Spinnereistr. 7, Tues-Sat 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Catalogue "Silent Reserve" from LUBOK Verlag Leipzig, €20.
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Berliner-zeitung
