When artists decide to make monochrome paintings today, they do not do so without knowledge of their history. However, for Maximilian Rödel, born in 1984, it is not a matter of continuing a tradition that begins with Claude Monet and reaches from Kazimir Malevich to Mark Rothko, Yves Klein and Imi Knoebel. Rödel’s darkly hued visual language, with colour gradients that give the canvas a gentle and cloudy pulse, are like open thoughts: There are memories, hints and echoes of places that cannot be not clearly determined, but their DNA is mediated atmospherically by the picture. Thus Rödel doesn’t abide by monochromy as a sphere of negotiating the autonomy of art, but opens up possibilities of associative perception. Clues to this are given by single intimations of corners and edges, curvatures and horizon lines, scratches and smudges, which point towards the figurative – however, none of this functions as a clear reference or a concrete symbolism, which the viewer must decode in order to end up at private mythologies or socially relevant narrations. Unlike Luc Tuyman’s paintings, which rely on reduced pictorial means in a similarly muted way, Rödel’s work does not revolve around allegories of the abyss of human nature based on historical or cultural events. His paintings evoke an existentialist fundamental attitude, borne by a vague tendency towards the mysterious and the uncertainty of being. The viewer’s eye gets lost in the colour gradients, cannot find hold in its search for a position, cannot find recourse in the space that hesitantly develops on the canvas, it reaches out for a perceptual anchor among the depicted shapes to no avail, instead of plunging into metaphysical or narrative realities – the contours on the picture surface are too vague to produce a lucid feeling of transcendence or narration. Effectively it seems as if the monk in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting had been removed, his spirit pushed into a different corner, where he continues his existence as a mere memory. What remains is the significance of a mood, not the mood itself. Rödel consciously eschews any type of staging that provides total immersion or storytelling in painting. Instead, the bright accents on the reddish-violet hues, sometimes drifting into a greyish black, only emphasize the emptiness more strongly: The monochrome surface does not linger in self-referential chromaticism, but becomes a space on the threshold of the apocalypse. With this Rödel’s painting has less in common with colour-field painting or a post-modern type of figurativity, and more with Romanticism and its heirs, ranging to Informel.

Umberto Eco referred to this movement in his 1962 essay volume The Open Work: In it he takes the ambiguity of the image as a starting point, to which no clear statement is allocated, but only a vague conception, a tendency, transported by the structure of the picture, which in turn he understands as a “system of relations.” The viewer also interprets this system openly, or rather contextually, depending on which culture, society or experience his background consists of. Despite the dark underlying tone of Rödel’s paintings, they can be read as open and interactive in Eco’s sense of the words. They do not subscribe to certain spiritual or surreal mindscapes, but stay in motion. Romanticism becomes an ontological atmospheric expanse.

Gesine Borcherdt