Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys

ISABELLA BORTOLOZZI GALERIE
Schöneberger Ufer 61
December 16–February 4

View of “Im Reich der Sonnenfinsternis” (In the Empire of the Eclipse), 2011, Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery, Berlin.

The list of fictional artists in the history of art is so long that by now it could fill whole encyclopedias. With their current exhibition, “Im Reich der Sonnenfinsternis” (In the Empire of the Eclipse), the Belgian artists Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys add another gloomy chapter to this genre. In the center of it all we find Johannes, a clichéd caricature of a painterly type, whose oeuvre is presented to visitors in the form of a posthumous survey show. Installed, often densely, throughout two rooms and one corridor are about 120 paintings and small sculptures: cheap canvases and paper with dirt-colored streaks, circles, and lines either smeared or applied directly from the tube; a black cross on paper; water-blue waves made from elementary school–grade paints; frottage on stone and wood; silhouettes; and even a painted harlequin mask.

The cheap symbolism, the ugliness, and the offensively exhibited dilettantism act as a general provocation; the art of Johannes appears to be all that “doesn’t work.” Right up to his purported death in 2010, Johannes was a typical “bad painter”; viewers are confronted by their own notions of art education, while in the distance, Anselm Kiefer, A. R. Penck, Jonathan Meese, Jutta Koether, and André Butzer all seem to be looking on. Many of these artists sustain their refusal of the “well-made” right up until they deliver a conspiratorial wink that serves to undo the alienation of their audience and to restore the customary rapport between artist and public. But in “Im Reich der Sonnenfinsternis,” there is no wink. Instead, in the gallery’s last space, the video “Das Loch” (The Hole), 2010, narrates Johannes’s story in fragments and, with its dark undertones, pushes the viewer’s estrangement even further. Johannes, embodied by a sad Styrofoam bust with an artist’s beret and red van Gogh beard, remains motionless in front of an easel: “Nothing will come of this painting, Johannes,” says his muse, Hildegard, from offscreen, her droning voice distorted by an equalizer. “Why don’t you make video films?” With their exhibition, de Gruyter and Thys pose big questions: What is a face? What is a story? What is beauty? What is good painting versus bad painting? The questions are intensified by the form of a doll-grotesque: Johannes. Herein lies the compelling persuasiveness of this show. With the cross-media approach of bad painting and videos of motionless scenes—presented together as a Gesamtkunstwerk—Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys take the art of anti-art to a new level.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Kito Nedo

Paul Laffoley

HAMBURGER BAHNHOF
Invalidenstraße 50-51
September 4–March 4

Paul Laffoley, The Orgone Motor, 1981, oil, acrylic, vinyl lettering on canvas, 73 1/2 x 73 1/2".

The term post-critical has been thrown around in recent years to describe the ideals of hybridity and inclusivity governing much contemporary art. In this context, the exclusive category of “outsider artist” appears antiquated and counterproductive. Reflecting on this contemporary scenario, curators Udo Kittelmann and Claudia Dichter initiated a project space in Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof dedicated to artists who have been largely excluded from the mainstream art world. In the second exhibition in their program, titled “Secret Universe II,” the forty-year career of the Boston-based artist and architect Paul Laffoley is granted reassessment. Featuring over thirty paintings and prints comprising dense interplays between philosophical texts, mystical diagrams, and historical references, Laffoley’s superb draftsmanship frames his paranoid and hyperactive assessments of how history interacts with and constructs the future.

Combining a Conceptualist sensibility with New Age illustration techniques, Laffoley’s works reveal his engrossment in the alternative realities and lifestyles synonymous with the counterculture of the 1960s. His paintings evoke a Philip K. Dick–esque world where history, psychosis, and science fiction come together in ways that are simultaneously thought-provoking, entertaining, and, frankly, weird. Aligning his artistic practice with historical figures from R. Buckminster Fuller to Heraclitus, Laffoley gives an architectural schema to speculative notions and mysterious historical forms, tackling subjects as diverse as kabbalah, the shroud of Turin, quantum theory, cosmogenesis, the work of Wilhelm Reich, and the philosophy of Lucretius. His unconventional theories are delicately spelled out with adhesive lettering on the surfaces of his paintings, conveying his esoteric beliefs and giving the exhibition its legibly driven character. Yet the innovative pictorial arrangements of works such as The Orgone Motor, 1981, and The Eloptic Nohmagraphon, 1989, are often more captivating than the theories themselves. The exhibition provides an engaging introduction to Laffoley’s fascinating career, and exemplifies the move in contemporary art to abolish “outsider” status.

— Wes Hill