Jonas Lipps’s seemingly random selection of works on paper appear as if they had been rummaged out of a back room for presentation in this current agglomeration of small-format drawings, watercolors, and collages. Their context is difficult to discern because neither exhibition nor work titles exist. The surreal images instead challenge the observer by oscillating between the sense and nonsense of the everyday, or between inner and outer worlds. For instance, in a couple drawings (all works untitled, 2015) a gigantic molar suddenly emerges from a landscape, or a dolphin prods a woman’s belly upon which tiny men are also clambering. The bad-dream scenarios not only play with the viewer’s expectations—excelling as they do at black humor, absurdity, and irony—they also take up an aesthetic that is immediately reminiscent of the sweet liveliness of children’s book illustration and also, through their satirical charge, of caricatures.
It is above all their details which often seem strange, uncanny, or funny, but also melancholy, as when the watercolors run uncontrolled across the yellowing paper and blend into one another. Lipps uses these genres of narrative drawing in order to generate visual illusions that are more than simply formal rigor. Ultimately, it is precisely the shopworn impression made by the works and their at times somewhat clumsy style of drawing that points to a conscious adoption of a certain amateurishness and antipathy toward compulsory ideas of the “contemporary.” This lends the work sovereignty and poise.
Translated from German by Diana Reese.
