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The Garden and

the Jungle
an Interview with Neo Rauch

Interviews · Issue 151 · September 2019

Two things are immediately apparent when you look

at the art of Neo Rauch: his technical skills are
virtuosic and the paintings are consistently enigmatic.
Visually, there is much to see. The paintings and large
drawings are activity-laden; every character in his
compositions is doing something, the kind of work
that moves objects around but to no evident purpose
and with no apparent outcome. Structures get built,
costumes are put on, men and women pay rapt
attention to what they are doing. But for the viewer
nothing adds up to anything that could be declared a
readable narrative. Der Stammbaum/Family Tree,
2017, is a large oil on paper drawing that was
included in “Neo Rauch: Aus Dem Boden/ From the
Floor” at The Drawing Center in New York from
April 11 to July 28 of this year. The title seems to
allude to a confusing ceremony in which a single tree
is being planted by a man dressed in red clothes, as
are two women who are holding red containers that
might contain water, or might be shopping bags. Or,
as a way of extending the meaning of the eponymous
title, they could be members of a genealogical family
tree. The shadows their bodies project onto the
ground are swirling, dwarfish shapes, like contorted
puddles. The planting in which they are participants
takes place in a public space dominated by an odd
piece of sculpture that draws the attention of four
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darkly dressed figures. A fifth figure looks back at us.

He could be one of the picnicking men in Manet’s Le
Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863, except the situation we
find him in is no frolic. Rauch is open to what he has
elsewhere described as “the desire for risky
encounters,” and his inclination is to stage
disruptions in the work; the degree of that disruption
can be everything from “a fine fracture” to “an act of
violence.” Der Stammbaum is a measure of the
former; Sperre/Barrier, 2018, presents something of
the latter. The painting includes a captive giraffe, an
orator who stands on a wooden crate that is
comprised of a roil of snakes, and a woman who is
about to cast down a flag, with Old Testament zeal,
on a hybrid man/snake whose world-weariness
makes him a perfect victim. The colour of the flags
the woman holds matches the edges of the wooden
X-shaped barrier above him. In other paintings by
Rauch this assembly becomes a surrogate crucifix,
waiting for a man or a snake, or both.

This is conjecture; as viewers

we are always in the position
of trying to piece together a
narrative that remains
allusive. Rauch says in the
following interview that he is
on the lookout “for
kaleidoscopic messages from
the depths of my
subconscious,” and he
Neo Rauch, Der Stammbaum, 2017, oil on
paper, 66.25 x 81.375 inches. © Neo Rauch. suggests that his imagination
Courtesy Neo Rauch Studio, Leipzig. can best be characterized by
the mycelium, the widely
branched, underground mushroom. For him,
“everything is connected.” Below the surface his mind
forms “strange patterns and at crucial moments the
compressed materials break through the crust and
manifest themselves as forms.” He says that “a good
picture should be timeless, suggestive and peculiar.”
Using this definition, he makes very good pictures,
indeed.

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Rauch’s paintings and drawings always involve a

story, but they don’t make available any of the
conventional ways that we have come to understand
what that story is. In a painting called Vater/Father,
2007, a vaguely melancholic man, tidily dressed and
holding in his arms a small-scale human being, stares
off into space, while another man takes pictures with
a small 35 mm camera. There are other paraphernalia
on a table in the foreground: a vase, an armour
breastplate, a cluster of four small votive candles and
a meringue dessert. Beyond the foregrounded table is
another table on which sit plated pie slices, and above
them are four ornate letters that spell out the name of
the exhibition: “para.” What is most peculiar is that
while the three men appear to be the same age, they
are all different sizes. The most conspicuous thing
about the largest figure—presumably the father of the
title—is that he wears a pair of ridiculous, cartoony
yellow rubber gloves. He looks to be a compromised
caregiver in the same way that the painter in Parabel,
2007, who also wears floppy gloves, will have
considerable difficulty in painting the way he wishes
he could. Rauch suggests that the figure in the
painting is a self-portrait whose specific condition
says something about the life of the painter generally.
“It is quite obvious,” Rauch says with absolute
conviction, “that this calamity turns into a metaphor
for a permanent dissatisfaction with the painterly
process.”

Neo Rauch was born on April 18, 1960, in Leipzig,

where he still lives. He is the best-known member of
the New Leipzig School, a contested name assigned to
a group of painters who studied at the Leipzig Art
Academy, the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst,
in the late 1990s and who have since come to
international prominence. He is represented by the
David Zwirner Gallery in New York and by Galerie
EIGEN + ART in Leipzig/Berlin.

Neo Rauch responded to a series of emailed questions

on July 22, 2019.

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BORDER CROSSINGS: In an
interview in 2007 you talked about
how pictures get made and you said
you reach a point where you give
the painting “the freedom to
demand the addition of particular
building blocks.” This is what a lot
of writers I have interviewed say,
that at a certain point the story or
the novel starts writing itself. Does
your painting, similarly, start
painting itself?

NEO RAUCH: Yes, at a certain point

I take a step back and follow the
directions of the painting and try to
fulfill its demands in a diligent
manner.
Kap, 2018, oil on canvas, 118.125 x 98.375
inches. Photo: Uwe Walter. © Neo Rauch/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy the artist and David
Zwirner, New York.

Does that make you a kind of painterly

amanuensis, a recorder of the movement of your
own imagination?

Certainly. I look for kaleidoscopic messages from the

depths of my subconscious and make sure that the
material on the canvas translates my subconscious
into a compelling composition.

Is your imagination more rhizomatic than organic,

so that it relies less on growth than on a series of
unpredictable and unplanned eruptions?

I like the term “rhizomatic” because it seems to lead

me in the right direction. However, the “mycelium,”
the widely branched body of a mushroom rooted
under the earth, seems to grasp even better the
imaginary principle that prevails in my case.
Everything is connected; below the surface of our
mind things form strange patterns and at crucial
moments the compressed materials break through
the crust and manifest themselves as forms.

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You said in an interview with Ena Swansea that

“I’m only in conversation with myself, with my
subconscious.” Does that mean that any
connections that you make are dreamlike, and
unavailable to the viewer as ideas that can be
connected to any story or meaning that might
emerge from the work?

I create paths that lead the viewer through the

gardens of my paintings, though occasionally they
may also lead him directly into the jungle of complete
incomprehension. In those cases both the viewer and
myself have gone too far. In general I believe that a
good picture should look like a cultivated garden;
where the visitor feels in good hands, feels
intellectually nourished, and arrives at a deeper
understanding in a non-obtrusive way, and from
certain angles he might see enlightening distant views
across the hedge in the back. That is what I can
provide as a painter. I leave the provision of other
educational and reference materials to other
authorities.

Because they are not

premeditated, do the
smaller works on paper
become a version of
automatic drawing? I know
I am getting close to
surrealism here and that
you have rejected that style
Neo Rausch in studio. Photo: Uwe Walter. of making art, so I’m
Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New
interested in your sense of
York.
the distinction between how
you work and how
surrealism operates.

Yes, the smaller works on paper can be considered a

piano exercise, but I still move along the same tracks
of my associative imagination as on the big canvases.

The paintings and large drawings seem to embody

something that approximates a very particular kind
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of folklore, but one in which the narrative is not

available to the viewer. Does that characterization
of the look of the work make any sense to you?

That seems to be an accurate characterization.

Apparently I’m on the trail of an imaginary
ethnological phenomenon! I scrape the soot of the
millennia from a glass surface, which gives us a
window onto a parallel universe, whose inhabitants
carry on with their everyday activities and rituals
without knowing that they are being observed.

One of the ways in which the paintings and large

drawings are confusing is that while their meaning
is ambiguous, the rendering of the component
parts—the figures and objects and architectures—
are resolute. They are the opposite of ambiguous.

Are they so clearly made as a way to highlight their

resistance to being understood as elements of a
readable narrative? The question can be answered
completely in the same sense as the previous ones:
the robustness of the claim corresponds to the
intensity of the perception offered by the cleared
glass.

You have said that one of the things you need in

painting is “the desire for risky encounters.” Do
you ever find it necessary to dial up the risk factor
because you regard the work as getting too settled?

That depends on how finely the scale for the concept

of “risky” is adjusted and on which level the
encounter should take place, whether on a formal or
on a content level. If an image becomes too settled
and complacent, then I feel that a disruption in the
composition must be staged, which could expand in
the space as a fine fracture or as an act of violence.

You claim that you want to avoid the possibility of

making a disinfected painting. Does that mean you

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will expose it to being infected, and is there a

procedure or a strategy for doing that?

Perhaps what I meant is that it is important for me

not to keep the picture clinically pure but to ensure
that the noxious can also nestle in it. The aim is not
to create zones of moral and formal purity but rather
to correspond to the impure and the sensual that are
inherent in the image.

Is there a risk that the painting or drawing can be

poisoned?

Yes. By taking on an
overdose of moral, political
or additional
overzealousness, it can be
poisoned.

One of the ways you talk

about composing is that you
are attentive to the times
when you have to make a
cut and put in what you call
“zones of interference.” You
also insist upon the
necessity of “inexplicable
zones.” What determines
that intervention? Is it an
aesthetic decision?

Yes, these are purely formal

aesthetic decisions.
Neo Rausch, Top: Propaganda, 2018, oil on
canvas, 98.375 x 118.125 inches. Photo: Uwe
Walter. © Neo Rauch/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
In the interview you did
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New with Robert Ayers in 2007,
York. you referred to a rather
Bottom: Sperre, 2018, oil on canvas, 98.375 x “precarious balancing act
118.125 inches. Photo: Uwe Walter. © Neo
between thesis and
Rauch/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy the
artist and David Zwirner, New York. antithesis, between above
and below, real and surreal”
and so on. That framework is classic Hegel, and if

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we carry the philosophical argument through, is

the completed painting a synthesis of those
contrary conditions?

As a painter, I am automatically in the position of the

equilibrist. To bring a picture into balance means to
balance it out on all its sides, otherwise the
composition will not work and it will create physical
tension with the viewer, which would ultimately
impact the viewer’s state of mind. This model is,
indeed, a direct reflection of conditions in society.

Esto se conecta de una manera intrigante con su

idea de que el principio fundamental del
modernismo es la duda. ¿Estoy en lo cierto al
pensar que una condición previa para una
expresión exitosa o satisfactoria es mantener
operativa la duda?

Necesito dudas y certezas; solo el último debe ser

tratado con precaución. Cuando hablo de estados
equilibrados, también se refieren a estas dos
antípodas. Las certezas pueden llevar a estados
políticos, morales o religiosos de endurecimiento que
la duda puede perturbar. La duda nos protege contra
la infección ideológica y es estimulante y me inspira a
encontrar alternativas en la pintura y en la sociedad.

¿Es el significado del arte, entonces, la expresión

deliberada de una epistemología de la duda?

Esta es una buena conclusión. Si el arte tiene algún

significado, puede ser eso.

Esto me da la oportunidad de volver a la literatura,

la poesía esta vez. La poeta estadounidense del
siglo XIX Emily Dickinson escribió sobre la poesía
como "ver las cosas inclinadas", una perspectiva de
indirecta. En este sentido, ¿quieres pintar cosas
inclinadas también? ¿Su versión de esto es "la
visión por el rabillo del ojo"?

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Extraño. Eso significaría que empiezo desde una

perspectiva externa y luego trabajo hasta llegar a la
mitad. Más bien busco preservar la posición en el
medio y por el rabillo del ojo para dar una gran
importancia a los predecesores. Por lo tanto, en un
contexto fundamentalmente aburrido, trato de estar
abierto a lo innombrable, desconocido y extraño.

En un momento dijiste que estabas "solo interesado

en las imágenes y el texto entre líneas". ¿Eso
significa que el núcleo de tu trabajo es el
intersticial? Entonces, ¿qué le interesa es la relación
inminente de una figura a otra, o una situación que
está en un punto en el que está a punto de cambiar?

"El texto como los barrotes de la jaula y el tigre

pisando detrás de él". De esta manera, Ernst Jünger
caracterizó el efecto de la poesía. Y lo que es cierto de
la poesía, también lo reclamo para pintar. Por
supuesto, también hay una puerta oculta en los
barrotes, y quien posea la llave para ello, se enfrenta
al Esencial de inmediato, siempre que lo haga un
buen uso.

¿Es esto a lo que Luc Tuymans se refiere cuando

escribe sobre "la extraña sensación de que sus
pinturas retienen el aliento"? ¿La implicación es
que cuando exhalen, todo cambiará?

Sí, exhalar sería como abrir la jaula.

… Para continuar leyendo la entrevista con Neo

Rauch y otros como Wanda Koop, Alex Janvier y
Tammi Campbell, solicite una copia del número 151
aquí , ¡o SUSCRÍBASE hoy!

Este artículo apareció originalmente en Border

Crossings # 151 , publicado en septiembre de 2019.

Border Crossings mira el arte contemporáneo con

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