THE DARK CONTINENT
Sigmund Freud once described female sexuality as the „dark continent“ - but it would probably be too simple to describe this as the central theme of the works shown in the solo exhibition of Leipzig-born Berlin artist Ondrej Drescher.
Drescher doesn‘t make it easy for the viewer anyway, as he confronts them with mainly small-format watercolours whose colourfulness and structure seem as if the scenes depicted can only be seen through a veil, which pushes the viewer into the position of the unnoticed observer. Even the seemingly unambiguous motifs are easily misleading - this is not about women with horses, nymphetic depictions of nature and erotically charged miniatures that seek to satisfy the voyeurism of the viewer. In Drescher‘s pictures, stories are told, relationships and bonds are negotiated, with symbolic imagery and fgures who are actively involved in telling these stories.
And so the „dark continent“ does not stand for the Viennese psychoanalyst‘s discomfort with female sexuality or the female sex itself, but rather for the mysticism of storytelling inherent in Drescher‘s works, the voids that arise when viewing them and the place to which viewers go when they engage with Drescher‘s narratives.
Elsa Mack (Ondrej Drescher; „The Dark Continent“, BARK BERLIN GALLERY, 2021)
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THE WOUND OF CREATION
All the colorful streaming and shimmering - physical and otherworldly at the same time, from the iridescent vegetative to the magnifcent and terrifying crimson of the Drommeten - from which sources does such a spectrum fow?
Almost everyone sees at best what they carry within themselves. But as if a demon had cut away his eyelids, the artist has been seeing and capturing in the picture for years what can only be endured through capture when one can no longer close their eyes. He traversed the enormous crystalline mountains of his early drawings, then obstructed and blocked landscapes full of hidden dangers and otherworldly beauty, and later the dark caves, tunnels, and bunkers of the primordial ground in which we all take root.
One who, like him, penetrated the darkness in the dark to discover its somber splendor, has eyes so sharpened upon his return that our masks and disguises vanish for him. He also sees the WHOLE far beyond infra and ultra: he is now clairvoyant and will remain so.
The second sight
He starts as a draftsman - and initially, he takes the Romantics at their word: the spiritual eye should illuminate what the physical eye merely perceived. The artist creates landscapes of the soul. Yet, even though he goes into hallucinatory detail and precise abstraction in his artistic ap- proach, this soon no longer satisfes him. Pure drawing seems to him to be too rational a process. Nevertheless, he remains more curious than many of his colleagues. The draftsman reaches for the scalpel and begins anatomical studies. He dares to gaze as the intrepid did among his predecessors. Now he knows what lies beneath our carefully cultivated skin, that the „crown of creation“ is a painful hubris, and that nothing sets us apart from any other creature. Persona - that only means a mask. The images beyond the individual impress themselves upon him: Under the soapy flm of our self-deception, there are no superfcial differences left.
He peels off the epidermis to recognize the truth. A striking late motif of his drawing phase is a face skin stretched on threads. He will incorporate it into his painting.
See
Painting broadens his view, and the irrationality of color provides further freedom. It once again serves the search for the essence. And while we may be able to shed our skin, we cannot escape the self and our inner worlds. Ghosts or revenants that are just as inaccessible as they are bright soon sneak into the landscapes. Or were they always there - everywhere, outside our everyday spectrum?
Seeing becomes a spectacle in the original sense. One who possesses this ability, whose gaze penetrates to the core of life, discovers and shows deep beauty in its terrifying timeless boundlessness. Now, in painting, drawing serves orientation again, just as precise and cautious, as if quickly turning on a transmitting and receiving device to determine: but only as briefy as necessary to avoid being targeted by the enemy.
The very corporeal color surrounds the reduced drawing cores, foams and splashes, and what is exposed congeals in the air: these are, perhaps, snapshots of extremely painful metamorphoses that lead to something much better, to liberation and happiness.
Creation
His standpoint: Ambivalences of opening and solidifcation, of dissolution and creation. We see existences suffering without skin, like Ensor‘s Man of Sorrows, greedy lust - or conception and transformation, fear and ecstasy, desire and wound, coagulate in shimmering beauty. This is the „Wound of Creation,“ as Gottfried Benn named it. The painter fearlessly continues European traditions here. Like his early kindred spirit William Blake, he works on the „Marriage of Heaven and Hell.“
Here is a modern-day romantic: a seeker and revealer, a pointer. He points to us, to our obsessions, our fetters, injuries, disembodiments, and possibilities: we are greater than we think, even if it is not at all nice and easy. We must endure beauty and its manifestations, we must conjure them in the truest sense of the word in order not to be torn apart. Or, as another remarkable artist says:
„ENJOY YOUR PERSONAL DEMON!“
Because this demon is the force that the painter also takes advantage of - because he could banish it. Now he is a true creator.
Holger Jancke (Ondrej Drescher; „Soma/Cella“, Gallery Zink, Waldkirchen, 2018)
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INTERVIEW WITH ONDREJ DRESCHER
Konrad Adenauer Foundation (EHF 2010)
Berlin, January 2016
Regarding the term „position,“ I can‘t say much. I don‘t understand it; I don‘t know its context.
When I‘m in the studio, it doesn‘t matter.
When you read texts like the exhibition text for Cella at Kromus+Zink, can you relate to them? Do you recognize yourself in the descriptions of your work by others?
There are things I keep hidden in my paintings that don‘t come through in such texts. That‘s why they are always just a kind of noise to me. They have little to do with what is important to me in the paintings because what is important to me is well concealed.
Why do you hide things in your paintings?
Because I can‘t bear not to hide them.
As preparation for our conversation, I wrote down a series of opposing pairs: drawing vs. painting, human vs. landscape, fgurative vs. abstract. So, showing vs. hiding would be another one. Contradictions are good. It‘s not that the hidden things shouldn‘t be seen at all. One just has to make an effort to see them and fnd their meaning, their coherence. I don‘t paint literal representations of things; there‘s always a subtext. People who are sensitive or have a similar inner world will fnd this way. It has happened to me before, standing with someone in front of a painting, and they quickly took the same path that I had laboriously taken in the studio. So fast that it startled me.
How do you come up with the subjects, the things you paint?
I walk around visually open. Essentially, I have an inner current that absorbs and takes in things without my being able to control it. The only thing I can do is look attentively into this stream of images and react to what is carried along with it. That‘s how I start engaging with things. It‘s diffcult because I also produce images that become part of the stream and disappoint me in that they often disappear quickly. I don‘t create images that are visually strong enough to stay in this current.
And should they?
The current has a transformative effect on me. It‘s not about creating something or making something beautiful; it‘s just always there. As long as it‘s flled with something visible to me, I can participate in it.
What about the results? Are your paintings primarily for yourself? Or do you also care about external reactions, such as feedback after exhibitions? I wish they were more important to me. I have to engage with these things. I make a living from the reactions my paintings evoke at exhibitions. But fundamentally, it‘s not important. People go to galleries, and one often gets the impression they think the exhibitions were made for them.
Quite a catastrophe, actually. I can‘t imagine that the artists I admire - except perhaps to satisfy their vanity - sought to communicate with the outside world, to address someone. The only addressee that always exists is oneself.
When I saw Cella at Kromus+Zink, I didn‘t think the exhibition was for me, but I did contemplate why the paintings were hung the way they were, what correspondences existed between them, and why certain formats were chosen. Can you say something about the formats, about large and small paintings?
The hanging was meant to create a contradiction between distance and proximity: one has to constantly switch physically between the large paintings, which require a certain distance, and the small paintings, which demand closeness for viewing. Hopefully, the mirrored walls add an impression of restlessness, even hopelessness or disorientation. That was my idea for the effect of this hanging.
Do people spend more time looking at large paintings?
It can create the effect that large paintings are more believable because they are more physical than small ones.
On the large paintings, I saw frame or stage structures, overlapping layers. I hadn‘t seen that in your older paintings; there, fgures often merged into landscapes, or landscapes into fgures, but they were in the same world.
The paintings at Cella are different from my older ones, and if you look at the paintings here in the studio, they go even further in a different direction. The painting strategy you hinted at, painting in layers or hiding something, is not something I consciously do - these are processes that happen automatically. I stand there, start a painting, want to drive it somewhere, but it doesn‘t work. Then it drifts away, somewhere else.
When do you consider a painting fnished?
Never. It‘s also not important whether something is fnished or not.
At some point, you decide not to continue working on a painting. That decision is infuenced by time constraints. The diffcult thing is that the paintings have to become objects. I could work on a canvas my whole life, keep painting over it endlessly.
Can you express different things through drawing compared to painting? I perceive drawing as something rational. It‘s challenging to open a level that is connected to spontaneous emotionality.
Drawing is a form of thinking?
Absolutely. I can imagine beforehand how the drawing will look, and that‘s how it turns out. On the other hand, color is anything but rational. It has no sense. Everything you see in color, you construct; it doesn‘t actually exist. This makes the work highly complex and uncontrollable. It‘s something I want to endure more and more. It‘s also associated with a great sense of helplessness; you grope in the dark and fnd no system. You can adopt principles, like always painting blue at the top and green at the bottom. Such codes are common in visual art, creating a certain sound, a recognizable style, but that‘s all. Struggling in the swamp of color is challenging.
And in terms of themes?
I have a very limited vocabulary; my themes hardly vary. They are landscapes that are mostly not without danger. Something is always in a process of dissolution. At the same time, you can see that the dissolution doesn‘t succeed. And then, in the paintings, there is usually someone in this landscape. And if not, that‘s important too. So, there‘s no one standing there.
What kind of landscape is it?
This might sound clichéd and implausible, but ultimately, it‘s about what generates dreams within us. When you sit on the train and doze off halfway, then wake up startled. The feeling that remains afterward. For me, that feeling is connected to images. This source infuences me around the clock, and I can‘t control it.
It‘s much more that the path was long, leaving all preconceived meaning behind, to see the terror, the limited space to which we are exposed. This is a quote from you, from Hans-Jörg Clement‘s text about your exhibition at the Adenauer Foundation, which stuck with me in connection with the frames/stages of the large paintings at Cella. What is the limited space? One could also say that nature is infnite.
It defnitely isn‘t. I don‘t remember exactly what I meant back in 2010. It probably has something to do with mountains. At that time, I used to go to the mountains a lot. I realized that I could do that, but it wouldn‘t take me away from myself; I wouldn‘t fnd a solution that way. The limited space we are exposed to is ourselves.
Is this limited space also the landscape you paint?
I named it that way for myself; there is something that affects me. This infuence doesn‘t come from outside but from within. In my paintings, I search for constellations in which I can depict this. The landscapes in my paintings represent what is happening inside me as an external infuence. Otherwise, I would just have fgures‘ shells that don‘t correspond to anything. This way, it‘s the inner turmoil portrayed through the landscape.
Was this a conscious decision for this kind of pictorial language?
I used to make large drawings. The biggest was 2 m x 1.6 m, and I worked on it for twelve weeks. I got up early every morning, went to work like a construction worker, and drew all day. It was a nightmare. The drawing looks great, but those were the most boring twelve weeks of my life. I sat in front of this huge drawing, and turmoil was boiling inside me; I could hardly concentrate. I would draw for fve minutes, then I had to take a break, smoke, drink coffee, then gather myself, sit down with tension, and continue drawing. That‘s how it went all day; I had to constantly fght with my concentration just to create something that was so detached from my inner self. At some point, I realized that it couldn‘t go on like this, that I would never become a calm, delicate draftsman. I had to change something to get into a rhythm with my inner self, to gain a view of this inner current so that it wouldn‘t detach from me. I‘m still working on that. I wander around and constantly have to discard ideas because I realize something becomes a sort of backdrop, I repeat things because they worked well before. Then I start to get bored or angry. When I lose myself, I get angry. These large, gestural things come very close to what‘s stirred up inside me.
Ondrej Drescher, born in 1977 in Wolfen, visual artist, lives in Berlin. EHF Fellowship of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation 2010.
Katharina Schmitt, born in 1979 in Bremen, theater director and author, lives in Berlin and Prague.
EHF Fellowship of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation 2014.
Text © Katharina Schmitt
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I AM NATURE
Immanuel Kant differentiated in his Critique of Judgment the concept of the Sublime into two categories: The dynamic Sublime as a subjective sensation (such as awe) in the presence of nature „...as a power that has no power over us.“ The Mathematical Sublime, on the other hand, is the objectively measurable magnitude of something so great that it requires no comparison to legitimize its greatness – like the infnite expanse of the sea or the height of mountains.
A graphic artist and painter, like Ondrej Drescher, who engages with the theme of mountains, naturally falls into the category of „painted Sublimity.“ Especially in light of his recent drawings featuring large-scale mountain panoramas, this classifcation becomes unavoidable. Countless tiny strokes confgure „the vast“ in the form of mountain landscapes and invite a meditative visual experience - akin to an abstract painting. Although the titles sometimes suggest that it‘s not just about the representational, but rather the portrayal of inner landscapes, Drescher‘s second genre - self-portraits - has always been considered separate from the landscapes, even though his self-portraits were treated with similarly intricate lines and strokes, and the titles and drawing style emphasized the connection between both genres.
In the artist‘s current paintings, not only a technical transformation occurs (from pencil to oil paint), but also a merging of both genres within the same pictorial space, as the painter now presents himself as a full fgure during a mountain hike. Instead of emphasizing his insignifcance compared to a monumental mountain range, he alters the dimension of the mountains in comparison to his earlier mountain views, rendering the category of the Sublime obsolete. Now, the mountains surround him as a pure landscape, without visible mountain peaks. Moreover, the landscape and the fgure blend into a unity. The subjective experience of nature here reveals more closeness to nature and the connection between us (as natural beings) and it, rather than highlighting reverence for its mathematically or otherwise grand scale. Accordingly, the color choice of the painted lines, which traverse both the landscape and the fgure, is gentle, and the color transitions are delicate, without harsh contrasts.
These new paintings also allow for both representational and abstract interpretation, as Ondrej Drescher carries his drawing style into his painted works and, in some pieces, covers the entire surface with lines. This approach recalls Jackson Pollock‘s all-over compositions, in which Pollock abolished any compositional hierarchy and treated the pictorial space „democratically,“ resulting in an ambiguous space that allows for countless perspectives and even the ability to set the space in motion visually. While Ondrej‘s works are neither poured nor dripped, but rather arise under the same visible control and precision as his drawings, there exists another similarity between the two artists concerning their conception of nature: When asked by Hans Hofmann in an interview why he doesn‘t work according to nature, Jackson Pollock replied, „I am Nature!“
Lu Potemka (Ondrej Drescher; „... aus der Kälte“; Galerie Potmeka, Leipzig; 2010)