Lars Theuerkauff
The artist's task is to represent what stands between the object and the artist – namely beauty, atmosphere, and the impossible.
Claude Monet
From Chaos to Cosmos. The Methods and Painting Strategies of Lars Theuerkauff
Finger painting might be the last thing that comes to mind when visiting an exhibition by the painter Lars Theuerkauff.
On the contrary, one envisions an atelier filled with brushes, spatulas, and all kinds of painting tools when observing his Titian-esque style.
However, when you visit Lars Theuerkauff's studio, where he sometimes also lives and sleeps, you won't find any of that. The artist uses only a palette, an old palette knife, acrylic paint, and, indeed, his hands, with which he applies the colors in direct contact. One of the paintings – Theuerkauff always works on three to four pieces simultaneously – hangs next to the balcony window in ideal working light.
Those who witness Theuerkauff painting without brushes become witnesses to an immediate, very physical creative process. After a rough layout of the motif on the canvas using a palette knife, layers of paint are applied with the right hand, pulling, rubbing, splattering, wiping with the thumb – and whatever other countless possibilities the hand offers.
Meticulously, Theuerkauff applies bright color accents with his fingertips, which, as soon as they are laid down, are softened and blurred with one or two sweeping movements of the back of his hand – only to regain some of the light just applied with a firm press of his palm. With such hand movements, the painter works on all parts of a painting almost simultaneously, one might believe, when watching him at work. On both dark and light areas, on intricate details as well as on the summative background. This shimmering painting process is only interrupted by the occasional stepping back and forth of the artist, as he squints to check the state of the work, constantly changing his mind, re-moistening parts of the painting with a water sprayer. Occasionally, he squeezes dried, crumbly paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, quickly rubbing the color chunks with the back of his hand or leaving them as thick crumbs.
By now, another color has long since stuck to his fingers, a dirty, muddy gray that also smells bad, and it has its own significance... These hand mixtures begin anew until the painting must be taken down to dry and replaced by one of the other works in progress.
In between, Theuerkauff takes a hearty sip from a large, earthen mug: lukewarm, black-brewed tea.
Throughout this slow, gradual formulation of his painterly thoughts while standing, in this constant rejection and rediscovery of painting ideas, in questioning entire sections (one must, says Theuerkauff, "always seek new proportions, question, break open"), it can happen, in the best case, that the painter shifts the entire painting into a new, different light. He places it in an unprecedented mood and forces himself to new conclusions and paths that serve as the compass and map of his art. If things go less favorably, the artist feels lost: such paintings he considers ruined.
Eighty percent of his working time on a painting, Lars Theuerkauff believes, consists of this laboring with color on the canvas. The rest he spends on laying out the motif: these initial sketches look very striking and precise on the unprimed, gray canvas. This is due to the precise transfer from a photographic reference, which will be discussed later. Everything here appears fresh, almost deliciously painted, and: essentially already finished.
In fact, it only begins at this point. "I start with neon colors when the silhouettes are drawn and the composition is made. Of course, something changes again, but the basic arc is there. And then it begins, then comes the sparkle of these colors. They build such a counter-energy among themselves... I am very grateful for these neon colors. I saw them with a painter friend; they are truly a help. Although I find these colors quite ugly in themselves, they bring such a glow. Afterwards, they are hardly visible, but at the beginning, they liberate the form. Initially, there is the gray tone of the raw canvas, along with the highs and lows of the texture. When neon colors are laid on top, they attack the forms, dissolve them, and put the whole thing into a special vibration and tension. Everything comes into flow."
In the further painting process, this pulsation is repeatedly interrupted as Lars Theuerkauff mounts the aforementioned murky gray sludge onto the canvas from a container. "I collect all my leftover paints in this vessel. This creates the gray tone, which naturally changes with the painting process.
For example, from a cool, bluish gray to a warmer green-gray – depending on which palette I am currently using. But it always remains a gray tone: after an intense painting phase, like at the beginning with the very bright neon colors, where it splatters and the colors fly, where I challenge the loss of control and try to break out of my conceptual framework, a calmer phase follows with this gray that levels everything out, simplifies, and makes it airy: that is my neutral color!"
How Lars Theuerkauff paints his pictures can be experienced in his studio. What he paints is visible in the images: without clearly defined backgrounds, people, entirely focused on their corporeality and mostly naked, are modeled from their immediate, unclear surroundings, drawn from light. From light that allows the portrayed to fluctuate between vulnerability and arrogance. If, by rare chance, two people are found in these pictorial spaces, there is already a lot of inner tension. Thus, double figures are only seen in intimate relationships of high emotional complementarity, as in Theuerkauff's Mother and Child series.
Just as contemplative and aggressive phases go hand in hand in his actual painting process, and just as the images continually question the viewer's perspectives, Lars Theuerkauff, from motif discovery to final composition, is primarily concerned with not settling for any obvious answer. When it finally comes to the point that the painter decides on a picture motif, whether it is – occasionally – one found in print media or on the internet, or whether it is – which is the norm – through an image that he has staged himself in elaborate photo shoots, these photographs are always subjected to the same process: first, the already existing photographic motif is, in a sense, torn from its frame: "I check and question the forms by tearing apart several images of a motif and reassembling them slightly differently. I do this to break up the perfect proportions created by the photo.
To extract the photographic motif from its untouchable, technical world. For me, even an accidental first crease in the photographic template is a return to life."
With a camera phone, which, due to its indeterminate age, lacks most of today's technical capabilities, the artist photographs the motif from his notebook. He does not hold the camera parallel to the screen but at a slight angle – yet another alienation of the original motif. Gradual, yes, but the effect is astonishing: every tiny change in perspective alters the color, form, and mood of the entire motif, as can be immediately seen on the large screen of the camera phone. The colors of different shots of the same figure or object, for example, shift from a yellowish green to a warm orange. Accidental shaking of the phone camera transforms the brightness values of bodies and spaces – from the approaching night to the dawning day.
Just as in Theuerkauff's actual painting process, which begins with concentrated work on the sober line and is always followed by a chaotic burst of color splatters that accepts the failure of the artwork, one discovers in his motif design already in the preparation an unwavering will to contingency: "It's also about the possibility of losing the image. I don't want to, yet I do. I want control. But I also want to work for that control. I want to lose it, but I also want to regain it. I always want to reach that edge where the painting can seriously fail. There have been a few paintings that were out. Not many, but with one, I thought: this is really messed up, truly lost. I later tried a new color on it: and suddenly it was there! It was such a white tone that flowed – je ne sais quoi – like foam and suddenly had a kind of light that you have never seen in a photo – and certainly not in real life. A completely unique light!"
It has grown dark. In the studio, spotlights shine on the paintings. The tea is no longer warm. One final question remains: What is the purpose of this enormous artistic effort?
What is the purpose of this almost scientific meticulous study of a world of things that cannot actually be depicted? For we can at best depict the idea we have of things; even the supposedly technical neutrality of photography and other technical image media allows us to see nothing but what we want to see, the perspective for which we have built the devices. And we always want to see, the more the better. Rarely has this been so obvious as today: a treasure trove of images, unimaginable until recently, has broken the privileged image dominion of painters; digital technology has distributed the right to alter images to everyone. This treasure trove has now been issued in such small coins that everyone holds it like a little king in their hands. Only with the unaristocratic duty and invitation to now have to do everything themselves. And if things were fair, this unprecedented compilation of images should rather entice us to give up our horror vacui and be freed from the compulsion to constantly create, disseminate, and view images. After all, all images already exist, online. And they should rather spur us on to finally learn to see freely.
So why does Lars Theuerkauff engage in his, by the way, joyful mixing of the additive, physiological color circle with the subtractive system of physical color theory? Why does he blend his radically subjective painting methods with objective image sources like the camera? What drives him to think and develop theories, to attempt to articulate art in fragile metaphors during conversations – a notoriously futile endeavor?
Perhaps to lead us out into the open and, like after a museum visit, to allow us to see the world with new eyes. Perhaps to measure and somehow make tangible for us viewers the immeasurable mountain of images, the never-ending stream of representations.
At the end of his efforts – his journey through the lonely land of artistic creation, his constant attempt to leave behind established certainties, to explore abysses and unknown boundaries – at this end, it may be that the artist encounters himself as a stranger beyond these boundaries in a state of bewilderment. For then it can happen that the artist steps forth from the dionysian-apollonian oscillation.
Leaving behind the disordered darkness of chaos, a magical light gradually lays itself over the patient subjects in Lars Theuerkauff's paintings, not unlike that which would shine upon us if we found ourselves, rescued from a tremendous cataclysm, back on safe shores.
No, we would not see the light itself; it would blind us with longing, but in its delicate reflection, we would have life.
(Text by Oliver Rätsel)