René Schoemakers - Postauratische Belsatungsstörung

René Schoemakers is a philosopher and an artist. He lives in
Kiel and in the carefree intellectual distance. In order to
question the 'real' with a sense of amazement, a central
position is not required. The unique artistic position
Schoemakers takes is difficult to describe. As a philosopher
he knows how to brashly liberate himself from the noose of
futility. The way Schoemakers handles canvas and color is
potentially a well-considered act of defiance, but perhaps
only a parallel action against intellectual decay and
forgetting. His artistic worldviews are expressed in the
synchronistic presentation of divergent levels of
representation: of images within the image, lines of text
and textual fragments within the image, models within the
image. Self-opinionated image constructions are his close
range combat zones. For him contemplation creates the
internal distance he requires. Both levels form the echo
chamber in which Schoemakers formulates hypotheses.

René Schoemakers arranges the components of his works
clearly and analytically. Yet, the intent and purpose of this
process are not necessarily readily apparent to the viewer.
Perplexing multi-part compositions, commentaries, fast
cuts, scenes that seem more like trial runs than
"situations," determine the coordinates of his artistic
practice. Through the work's sensual potential for
persuasion, Schoemakers leads the viewer onto sheets of
emotional thin ice, which are meant to cause nothing less
than a postauratische Entlastungsstörung ("post-auratic
exoneration disorder“). Hence the title of the exhibition.

Schoemakers choses Walter Benjamin's concept of the
"decay of the aura" (*) as a "conceptual springboard for
self-reassurance" (R.S.). Schoemakers contradicts
Benjamin, in that Schoemakers has the ability to
rehabilitate the auratic - through textual response, as well
as pictorial means, particularly regarding his new series
radix. In doing so, Schoemakers works in a markedly
intelligent and informed fashion and is able to utilize
contemporary artistic conventions of executing form and
pictorial expression in a highly complex manner. He is a
conceptual artist, for whom individual works achieve
importance only within context. Thus the artist's mania for
working in series, structured by specific levels of
organization and numbering sequences.

In his artistic stagings, in which he achieves nothing less
than drawing the world into his work, the operating
principle of extreme naturalism holds weight. Those touched
by Schoemakers provocative themes find themselves in the
same boat with the artist - soaring on a high of
contemporary art production and, simultaneously, burned
at its stake.
Christoph Tannert
(*) In: Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction (1935)