Neo Rauch: After the Revolution

From the series of essays

Ritual Practices by Elaine Smollin
Inveroart.com December 2014

On the road from Frankfurt-am-Main to Leipzig, departing the state of Hessen

into Thuringia, a vast heap of salt towers above the passerby. This looming giant, the
byproduct of industry, dwarfs the relevance of anything nearby. The power of its sheer
enormity stuns the senses, pressing the improbability that we can stack anything of
such scale so high.

Neo Rauch, 2007, Die Fuge, oil on canvas, 118 1/8 x 165 2/5 inches.

Neo Rauchs December 2014 show at Zwirner Gallery marks a time in which the
perennial act of composing images meets an equally vast scale of reference to visual
culture. And so, as if to answer a dream of New York and Leipzig cultures, I had the
wonderful satisfaction, as I turned to view a wall of Rauchs paintings, to see David

Salle, the progenitor of complex riddles, arrive to greet and congratulate Rauch at his
opening reception.

We live in a moment when the outcome of aesthetic currents that were struggled
over and crafted by mind into new forms of expression throughout the twentieth
century, appear as freely realized approaches to form, and, sequential narrative is not
suppressed. Rauch and Salle, above all, consider the picture plane their circus of fate.
To each of them comes naturally a means to assess how the long, relentless
accumulation of imagery impacts us. Whether we know its meaning or not, we feel the
force of this accretion, which is perhaps closer to truth.

I walked within the expansive totem-like worlds of Neo Rauch paintings at

Zwirner Gallery as if to walk today, as I did in 1992, in the streets of Leipzig, Berlin,
Vilnius, Riga, Tbilisi, and, Moscow, (and later on in Ulaan Bataar) in search of
innocense.

In those actual cities, as in the paintings, I found the inner dimensions of trust in
appearances- where all outcome of existence leap to consciousness through either their
glaring revision, their absence, or, through the stunning suprizes of past lifeways
preserved in a built environment.

These worlds, proscribed by architecture, are attended by glimpses of episodic

events between phantom-like people whose culture fits securely in nature because it is
simply real without the likelihood that irony, revisionism or inuendo will redefine its
value. It has already been redefined as the theater of past consciousness.

Here, in Rauchs paintings, is also that essential element of nature, the co-existent
ecosystem as the theater of its co-dependent metamorphosis with humanity.

Neo Rauch, Hter der Nacht, 2014, Oil on canvas.

118 1/8 x 98 x inches

Neo Rauch, Das Horn, 2014, Oil on canvas.

98 x 188 1/8 inches

Im drawn to this staging of the accretion of visual histories that occupy our
unconscious. Anyone who lives for a time in foreign cultures relies on the
companionship of visual culture in the smallest and most imposing of things to pave the
way to speech in another language. No wonder then, that many painters, whose work
flows between nations and cultures, can expose this simultaneous inner, meditative,

trust in image legacies. With exposure throughout our lives to the largest legacies of
world imagery of all time, composition becomes a game of reason and dream recall.

Now, what is transpiring in such works, that lay just beyond our ken, always just
beyond reach of rational location within our personal histories, and, our place in the
long current of historical processes? Where are we in this projection of collective fateimposed on us physically and emotionally? The paintings of Rauch and Salle are a great
place to look.

For Neo Rauch, formidable construction of pictorial space gives us a view of psychic
appraisal of sixty years of a societys experience within geographical destiny. For David
Salle, defiance against consumerist culture, gave form to an unspoken subjugation to
eroticism- to show how the pursuit of lust is correspondent with suppressed rage (in
some) at the delayed call to the ideology of endless war. In these artists works we can
find simultaneous reflection upon their respective societies that so define this turn of
millennium.

David Salle 2012 Standoff Oil and acrylic on linen, 84 x 131 inches

Here above, in Standoff, 2012 actual nude women press their painted bodies
onto a panorama of battle as if the young mothers of all men might diffuse the ideology
of rank, valor and death and put a rebirth of sense in place of war.

In many a Salle image, women are a metaphor for the body of history, carrying,
as they do, their liberation from the burden of earlier times when the obligatory five- to
twelve- and more births, trapped them in remorseless biological straights. While in
Rauch imagery, Europeans see dreams of their ancestral legacies reenacted within a
topography of environs, in Salle, we Americans see reenacted the dream of our freedom
from personal confrontation with the cold war as our contemplation of womens bodies
and female psyche as the topography of our best defense against repression of personal
freedoms through ideology.

Neo Rauch, 2008, Alte Verbindungen, Oil on canvas 98 3/8 x 118 1/8
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

Where people living just outside of Leipzig in the former DDR saw massive strip mining
for coal desecrate the landscape with reunification, came the covering over of the earth
with new fertile farmlands and the new lake district, of flooded former coal mines,
Neuseeland. Rauch seems to recall this in the 2008, Alte Verbindungen.

David Salle, 2010, The Mennonite Button Problem, 2010,

Oil, acrylic on linen, 84 x 156 inches

Meanwhile, in Salles, The Mennonite Button Problem, of 2010, we can see how,
below a tranquil sea devoid of any notion of doubt, solitary women replace the male
warrior of ancient art as the subject of a figural frieze. In their seemingly nocturnal or
subterranean lair, privacy reigns, with no sign of partner or loving voyeur. To solicit
that empathy, the effort is in the viewers experience. This is the kind of space where
Odysseus went among the shades in search of his mother.

Its interesting to see the title of the image of women in this substrata refer to
Mennonites since it was at what would become the Karaganda coal mines where ethnic
Volga Germans, Mennonites included, were deported by Soviets in the mid-twentieth
century to begin to construct, at first by hand, the vast strip mines that served as the
topography of their mass annihilation. Somehow no matter how detached from actual
experience the random collection of imagery may be, it is normally never irrelevant to
the world into which we are born and evolve.

Molodezhny coal mine. Site of deportation mid-twentieth century,

Karaganda region, Kazakhstan. Photograph by Vadim Makhorov

Which brings me to the use of buildings as a formational element in Rauchs paintings.

Grnderzeitstil. Each epoch has its formational moment. As a societys hopes coalesce
into concrete ideological form, architecture is called upon to carry the weight. The term
relates directly to the late nineteenth century phase of building in Leipzig and other
German cities and towns that proceeded until 1914. This movements style was also
parodied in the term for the fault lines of capitalism known as the Grnderzkrack.

So to see Neo Rauchs paintings at Zwirner Gallery in New York, is to be reminded how
the opulent, even corpulent, Baroque facades of Leipzig stand in contrast to the simple
geometric stucco buildings so common in the Baltic, Poland, and all of Mitteleuropa that
stand, some from the 16th century onwards, as the humble partners of simple
commerce among dozens of regional cultures.

ber den Dchern, 2014. Oil on canvas. 118 x 98 inches

Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

In the same week as Rauchs show opened, the anniversay of liberation from the DDR
was marked by release of Jenny Erpenbecks new novel, The End of Time. In it, the
merging of past and present is a precedent for the meaning of everyday life. For
Erpenbeck, a novelist and opera director, these precedents include realities of existence
known to those who preceed us, whose consciousness imbeds with anachronism to form
a type of mental ecology. There, feelings and events left unresolved, are allowed to
evolve in an unimpeded state to flow on in the historical continuum, directly in our
present consciousness.

Am Brunnen, 2014, Oil on canvas.

118 1/8 x 98 inches

Der Felsenwrit, 2014, Oil on canvas.

118 1/8 x 98 inches

In other words, knowing is layered and it is streaming. And what we know of the built
environment, the land and our generational succession into it, is a field of experience
open to the great, silent, human drama of inheritance, psychic, social, political and
artistic.

David Salle 2007 Last Night, Oil on linen, with wood and objects, 60 x 98 x 5 inches

Neo Rauch, Marina, 2014, Oil on canvas. 98 x 118 1/8 x 2 (250 x 300 cm)

This simultaneity of experience has led to evolution of painting as a repository for the
unscripted visual history of the last century. Its artifactual evidence has been coded as
collective pressure on individual artists psyches; and offered as the output of
unselfconscious mastery over what we have really inherited- trial and error attempts at
world peace, amidst the long age of capitalism and its antagonists.

In David Salles, Last Night, placed in frontal space, before the mother ships, canton
ware, the body of water and a multi-chambered manor house, a woman gazes beyond
her fate as if reluctant to see in it, any need for change. She is placid and in no need of
defenses. Another woman, analogous to a desirable mooring dock, is in self-possession

of the prime of her life, muscled and agile as the reptile, dragon or snake, on the Canton
plate.

While Neo Rauchs Marina of 2014 cuts a cross section through the past, showing a
propeller-armed crucifix, breached from the ocean, into the arms of the locals between
two tower monoliths, one Lutheran, the other medieval, David Salle has recently used
his instinctive choice of imagery to envision the broad inheritance of world society that
has become us.

David Salle 2007 Boing Boing

Oil on linen, 78 x 63 inches

David Salle 2013 Untitled

Inkjet print on fine rag substrate, 24 x 20 inches

In recent years his imagery cast the late coalescence of our old European-American
society. In Boing Boing, 2007, Salle repurposes an image of the ideal worker with a
totem, a meal, and, a vortex within which, people spin by. At the opposite end of this
spectrum, a pot of captive flora is perched above the womans head. The ancient art of

carrying it on her head is lost to the technologies that fail to affect her style of dressthat reverts back to life on the prairies. In 2013, he reckons with the new demographics
of our post European-American society as an Asian woman directs her glance beyond an
Aleutian totem.

Image making involves attempts to resolve ideological fixations to ask, Whose reality is
this? How do we assess the psychic leverage that the authors of ideologies try to assert
on us?

Salle and Rauch approach this intricate process from within its fulcrum, tilting our
frame of reference from societal pressure, to the inner freedom of individuals, who
each in their own way must undo ideology and do the tough work of reading deeply into
these alternative cultures of reason.

These painters grasp a type of psycholinguistics that evolves in such a parallel historical
record. The coded color Rauch imparts in the pink and turquoise on sepia, Der
Felsenwirt, for example, suggests a select cognitive filter, through which a painting can
embellish or invade a plane for reckoning with the unfamiliar stages of personal, and,
universal histories- and through this scheme, even the subconscious must somehow
pass.

Psyche strives to preserve her vibrant being, aided to various degrees by the
unconscious to seek balance among so many parallel worlds. Rauchs paintings always
suggest a reckoning with both belief and disbelief and never fail to examine how we may
parse a psychosymbolic thread of images. His paintings provide us with a link to
social-cultural innovations of the earlier century that were left incomplete.

In 2015 we hope to see how David Salle now considers this. If only this hat could speak!

David Salle 2012 Oil and acrylic on canvas, 96 x 132 inches

Neo Rauch images

Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery
David Salle images
(c) David Salle/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.