Hans-Joachim Müller |

Letting it appear

As if one was sitting in a cafe on a rainy day looking at the passers-by through the rain drops on the window. Just patterns. Whirring silhouettes that do not really maintain their shape. A filter between our eyes and the world which arrests the familiar directness, the short exposure times which seeing has become used to. What is real when perception does not function reliably? Perception responds exceedingly sensitively to disruption. It is irritating if things do not show themselves clearly enough. You rub your eyes, blame the fuzziness on your own inability, a haze, an abrupt under-supply of information to the senses. That one does not understand something straight away, only arriving at the sense and meaning via long detours that are always inflicted with insight, that would be all right. But that the difficulties begin with the viewing, this has to be unsettling. And you would never come to the conclusion that you could discover an objective world mood in the distortion, a tendency for objects to withdraw, a secret tendency to disappear. That which irritates likewise fascinates. Fascinating how the blurry layout of picture objects distracts and draws the perception to itself. Fascinating how through the perception of perception one’s curiosity grows as to the blurry picture objects, how on a rainy day in the cafe you cannot get away from the passersby outside on the street. Fascinating is the contemporary charm which is mixed into the image sensuousness of this young work. Andy Denzler’s “urban figures” all derive from the metropolitan here and now. And what makes them look as if they are behind milky glass this also has to do with urban viewing, with short-term stimuli and second-long signals, with the non-extinguishable synthetic light, with the turning up and down of spotlights, dancing light points, shooting light arrows, with the tenacious flow that steadfastly moving light leaves on the retina. The stroboscopiclike twitching of life cannot be illustrated. Pictures mark moments of peace, the stifled motion, the sudden torpidity. It is as if the metropolitan film suddenly stops as if one was to witness how one rapidly loses speed in the final meters, how one becomes increasingly slower until the “urban figures” stop abruptly in their tracks. You can look for ages and look repeatedly. The stark effect is not used up by repetition. But it would be too easy if all you saw was the technical painterly achievement. One does not paint people with the correct contours only to obscure the color adjustment and to replace the determined form with a vague trace. That it looks spectacular, that is one thing – how the sharpness of movement is created from a longer painted exposure time, that it has something suggestive about it, that the scenes are reconstructed on rain-sodden lineament from the dazzling plasma of figures. But on the other hand the complex painting process is based more on his thought processes than the sensual. Standing in front of these pictures one suspects that it is not sufficient to want to simply rip open the stage curtain with sharpened tools of perception. The figures there just seem to withdraw from your gaze. As if they were following a secret drift, they draw aside into the background of the stage where what we see and how we see it is happening far away. So far away that looking is not permitted to take possession of things as demanded by the subject’s pride. What essentially determines these pictures is the perceptively critical elegance with which they undermine the vio- lent act of seeing, their unfathomable doubt of that surety of perception, which knows about knowledge only through sentences such as “That’s how it is”. In Andy Denzler’s case the sentences start more carefully: It could be so. Maybe it is so. Perhaps your eyes will get used to objects without silhouettes if you just have a little patience and learn from them that the clear silhouettes which the focused eye likes to capture are nothing less than fiction, pure achievements of awareness excluding all that which consciousness is not aware of. Pictures were not always there. Vision got by without pictures for a long time. Not until the act of seeing saw that it was seeing, were there pictures. Pictures remind the eye that it is doing something, that it is visually cutting out little or large bits of the world. Small or large excerpts from the world are called pictures. And it is quite a secret how these small or large excerpts of the world stand out from the world, how they dig into our memory, how they dissolve, become murky, suddenly reappear as if they have released themselves from time and space. Nothing about Andy Denzler’s pictures suggests spacelessness or timelessness. “Urban Figures” is both a topographic and an epochal concept. And the classic unity of time, place and action is also valid for the moving theatrical piece which these “urban figures” perform. Action which is about nothing more than the secret of how one’s own world arises through seeing. There is also no contradiction in the fact that there are pictures in the work which combine an apparent content-related interest with the appearance of their figures. The free choreographs on undefined city stages back the “urban figures” with name and profile. A decidedly political gallery, pictures which are fully focused on the close-up faces on prominent faces such as Bush, Schwarzenegger, Michael Moore, Condoleezza Rice, Pope Johannes or Marilyn Manson. They appear on their grisaille-like background in monumentalized passport-photo sizes bereft of any spatial clues. It looks as if they wish to step out of space and time out of their social and historical environment to draw the attention entirely to themselves, their individuality, their importance and personality. In so doing they are immediately recognizable even if the deteriorating black and white of the portrait interferes greatly with the image. it never takes long to guess. Their media presence has made such icons of these heroes that we require little information to recognize them. The eye automatically supplies the rest. You a not likely here to think about the rainy day in the cafe and the blurry passers-by outside on the street. Rather about a worn monitor which when in constant use only beams out fleet opening lines. At first glance the displaced colors keep the story which appears to tell why those portrayed have been selected. You can sense that the inferred stories aim in a critical direction, yet the tremulous images do not join together in a lampoon. Rather, the watery film reflects the media network over their faces, their flickering forms of existence in the virtual space where nothing is really fixed, nothing reliable, and barely measurable distances lie between appearance and passing away, where it requires only minimal changes in the data records to revise and retouch the faces. In deciding on the medium of painting Andy Denzler assumes an obvious contemporary position. It is not for reasons of blind continuation, or stalwart recognition of tradition. In this work painting is a chance to precisely analyze his own world values, like no other picture medium allows. The painter assumes that in front of every picture one, two or an infinite number of pictures already exist, demanding, threatening, encumbering, indestructible. And he also does not act as if in the emphatically dramatized painterly act the genre is able to resurrected like on the first day of pictures. Everything is always second-hand. And before the long-studied, far from routine and still difficult to control deferring, pushing away, and tolerating of damp colors, the small photographic draft is first realized precisely in the painting, in the dimensions of the picture. And even before that, in the work with Photoshop, the processing of Polaroids or scanned silhouettes from some magazine - the neutral computer German does not reveal how the urban figures are quasi taken individually from the street in extraordinarily creative operations, converted, their context reorganized and how wide open space is created for them. Thus every picture derives from material of a preceding picture. And just where the very first pictures reside - the pictures in your mind, the sudden pictures in your memory which are also not available in the memory of Photoshop – nobody really knows the exact answer anyway. If you look over his early work you will also see an extensive path divided into an abstract and a figurative chapter. Apart from the fact that such a switch between the objective and the non-objective options in present-day art is not uncommon and can be well grounded with the conceptual understanding of aesthetic practice the break in Andy Denzler’s work is much less dramatic than it appears. One must first imagine the urban figures away from one of the new large pictures in order to experience how their stage instantly slides into a plane and turns into a mesh of geometrical areas of color. In fact it is not until the pictures are populated that something like depth is created, and the first subtle gradation of implanted figures, the shadows that they cast, allow the scenes to appear spatially. Without the actors and extras in their fixed places, floor and walls, stage and backdrop change back into a network of color- determined rectangles. And the painting would be right there again where it started - monochromes which tend towards sequencing and stacking. The abstract designs on which the “urban figures” series are also based are difficult to overlook. Anyway, the coherence of the work’s parts would be unrecognized if you would accuse the new pictures of wanting to make the old ones forgotten. Without an actual break the constructively distributed and weighted color areas in synopsis with the people and roles have become theatrical venues. Theatrical venues, however, are always temporary. And the next step in the work is as surely foreseeable as the continuity of painting which at its innermost, is interested in nothing as much as the prodigious content of every new picture – be it with or without a population. Continuity is something pointed up not least by the significantly painterly application of the paint. As today, with the act of carefully handling the soft mass of pigment, with the coarse patches and fissures resulting from the surface tension, the clay-like surfaces of the non-figurative pieces are composed of countless layers of paint, of diaphanous skins of paint that rupture here and there, allowing the color grounding to gleam through them. Elsewhere, the style of the painting suddenly becomes more vivacious, breaks out of the discipline of horizontal order, races with broad brushstrokes across the abstract surfaces, until the ever thinner paint is used up. And if the “urban figures” lack such dynamism, if everything on these canvases seems to be frozen in time, then the risky use of the knife on the soft colorist ground brings to mind some manipulation of the source code of the images, and likewise of the gestural idiom of former times. To paint is to let things appear. One of the most wonderful ways of letting things appear. And what appears never exists in the way that things exist. Which is why the sub-division into figurative and non-figurative art is also not that meaningful. What appears know no limits. Nowhere do the “urban figures” come up against the limits of Euclidian space. Thus the images reach beyond themselves, include, embrace you in their magic. Involuntarily, you become an inhabitant of the picture. And it is as if you were sitting in a café on a rainy day, watching the passery-by on the street through the rain drops on the window – and the painter interposes his filter between your eyes and the world, and dissolves everything into outlines, into oscillating silhouettes, and nothing loses shape, and everything seems to be liberated from shape.