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180515: Galerie Guido W. Baudach Charlottenburg: Erik van Lieshout - After the Riot II
Galerie Guido W. Baudach Charlottenburg:
Erik van Lieshout - After the Riot II
01.05.2015 – 06.06.2015
The path is the goal
By Thomas W. Kuhn
Politics in art is a difficult thing if propaganda and kitsch are to be avoided. He who dares to cast the discerning eyes of an artist on this terrain will have to ask himself where, in the course of the agitation, the limits of aesthetic business lie. Here, well meant is not always well done, as the art critic, then representative of a political power, once judged: a dilemma with which the still relevant "Raft of the Medusa" by Théodore Géricault reached the upper echelons of social discourse 200 years ago.
Erik van Lieshout does not shy away from treading this path. "After the Riot II" plunges right into the heart of the action and, in that act, affords the, above all notorious, denial of reality which can be vilified as "fouling one's own nest", a critical glance at his mother country. This view created for the public thereby hazards the consequence of being banal, like the installation on the Berlin Oranienplatz that admonishes the scandal of the locked EU external borders: symbolized by a polygon with doors locked from the outside.
For Erik van Lieshout, this is a type of Art Arena surrounded by mobile fences which create a semi-transparent inside and outside. One can enter this auditorium through a narrow door and look at films on two projection screens in which different protagonists in "play" get to speak about fleeing and immigration: the refugee, the smuggler, the profiteer. Wouldn't everyone be helped if the immigration to Europe for attractive Asian or African women would be facilitated to give corpulent and elderly men unexpected happiness?
The figure of this argument appears woodcut-like: the eternal evil in the form of the white man. In Erik van Lieshout's collages, his appearance may be carried out in playing an erotic role as a dog on a lead and as a dominant slave, dictate the rules of his desire to his exotic mistress. The situation is, according to Erik van Lieshout, a double play.
The situation appears similar from an inner European perspective when he thematises the Russian oppositionist, Alexander Dolmatov. The Russian politician sought asylum in the Netherlands and in 2013 – in all probability - committed suicide, allegedly in fear of being deported to Russia. Thus, Erik van Lieshout created a wasps' nest in the rooms of his Berlin Gallery that, with reference to the central, largely locked room, funnels the visitor in a perverse way into the role of asking himself whether he is an intruder, a prisoner, a locker-out, or a guard.
And does the artist escape the aesthetic dilemma? Sketches and collages make it difficult to overlook the Dutchman's ability. "After the Riot II" is for sale in a gallery – that is not circumventable as an economic factor. But just as uncircumventable is the factor that this work as a whole generates a set of uncomfortable questions and intervenes psychologically in the aesthetic-receptive auditorium. In any case, in Guido W. Baudach's program, Erik van Lieshout articulates the counterpart substantially in a form-conscious escapism of a Björn Dahlem, where, admittedly, both unify a deep sense of encompassing the installative, the room and the viewer.
Galerie Guido W. Baudach Charlottenburg
10785 Berlin, Potsdamer Strasse 85
Tel: +49 30 319 981 01
Fax: +49 30 319 981 03
email: galerie@guidowbaudach.com
http://www.guidowbaudach.com
Opening hours: Tue - Sat 11-18 hours
180515
