The image dictates, not me.
Current work by Stehn Raupach ( de )
Galerie Caprice Horn, Berlin 2008-12-05 – 2009-01-15
Stehn Raupach’s own signature almost disappears behind the features of a computer print. His images are created by millions of black, white and gray dabs painted with blunt brushes.
2007 marks a significant turning point in the work of Stehn Raupach (born 1965 in Frankfurt/Main). Narratives begin to disappear, contours liquefy, and images’ surfaces appear as rhythmic vibrating spaces. Often photographs serve as drafts for his paintings, but are changed beyond recognition. Painting simply functions as technique. The power over the image is left to computer technology. The creative act itself is not production, but the selection. “My aim,” explains Raupach, “is the eliminated line, the line which turns into surface.”
“I decide intuitively regarding the draft of a painting. The painting must commission me! The color is more a means to an end, a tool utilized in the process, immersion in a formula. The sensuality is intrinsic, in the design, in the decision, which work of art I will dedicate myself to. I compose and interpret, not during the act of painting, but before. Painting itself is like a self imposed cave for meditation.” (Stehn Raupach, 10/2008)
Those who try to find a connection between the images of 2003 and the ones shown in the upcoming exhibition will fail: “There is no trail,” explains Raupach, “it is more like a jump.” In his first painting o. T. (12/2003) it is less the bullet holes in the side of the white Mercedes that irritate us but the massive paint stroke over the window. An extinguished life? The artist also touches on existential themes in his new work, albeit, in a far more abstract form. Mount Everest ü 9000 (10/2007), for example, only reveals the atmospheric impression of its draft – a photograph of the first ascent of the highest mountain in the world. “This is the look inside of me, conveyed through the climbers,” says Raupach, “I imagine how I would feel, standing on top of the mountain.” The subsequent reworking of the photograph on the computer reduces the two featured men into an amorphous nothingness. Neither the mountain nor the surrounding landscape are recognizable as reality, but rather as experienced awareness.
Trancelike, Raupach emulates a musical rhythm when transferring paint to his canvas (he is a passionate drummer). Raupach takes months of intensive painting to complete a work (“I become a machine, my rhythm dictated by the work itself”). The works shown in the exhibition demonstrate that the artist is thematically unpredictable. According to Raupach his subject matter finds him and not vice versa. The overexposed street lamp Kein Wort (7/2008) resembles a hallucination, in Frieda (9/2008) it is the infant’s overproportional head that transforms the image into a heartbeat. As a tribute to Gerhard Richter’s Kerze (1983) and Nam June Paik’s One Candle (1989) Raupach tries to recreate the atmosphere just after a candle has been extinguished. In o. T. (11/2008): there is no light, but not as yet the sign of smoke ascending, only the transient moment before complete darkness.
A classical recurring theme in photography and painting is the artist reflected or mirrored in his own work. The recently completed painting, K Ich (11/2008) demonstrates Raupach’s searching and self reflection whereby the image: a monochrome black picture of an artist totally unknown to himself suddenly reveals the outline of his own self. The technical reworking and the act of painting turn this experience into a journey of self discovery.
Galerie Caprice Horn, Berlin
