Three canvases exhibited at the Center Pompidou in 2002, three others at the German Embassy in Paris: the encounter between France and Neo Rauch, a figure of contemporary art, must have waited for the retrospective devoted to him by the MO.CO. of Montpellier to really get done. However, assures the director general of the contemporary art center of Montpellier, Numa Hambursin, alias Neo Rauch, born in Leipzig, in the former GDR, is “a legend” for the current generation of French painters and his work a ” mysterious, hermetic, prodigious and incomparable beacon”.
The presence of 117 works, drawings and paintings at the MO.CO., a green setting in the heart of the 7th largest city in France, from July 8 to October 15, is all the more exceptional since the 63-year-old German artist is exhibited in any French public collection. The dream of reason, the title of this retrospective exhibition, will therefore be for many the discovery of a dreamlike, confusing universe, marked, at least in its beginnings, by his years of apprenticeship in Soviet East Germany.
Of his works from before the fall of the Wall, in 1989, Neo Rauch does not show anything in the vast and bright rooms of the museum since the course, largely chronological, does not begin until the turn of the 1990s. We must therefore guess, through canvases in raw tones dominated by red, black and white, with very architectural compositions, which were his youthful years in the GDR.
For Rauch, the post-Cold War period and German reunification constitute an “incubation period”, when “appears in him an appetite for what had happened in the West”, in particular Francis Bacon, explains the co- curator of the exhibition, Pauline Faure. A quest from which he then freed himself, at the turn of the year 2000, by “becoming aware of the importance of finding oneself and not getting lost in a permanent search for fashion”, adds She.
“These years of incubation are not directly linked to the Wall. At first, I first wanted to find an emergency exit and get closer to modern art”, confirms and specifies Neo Rauch while browsing the exhibition, happy to see his works, scattered in private collections ( one of which belonged to Leonardo Di Caprio), gathered “as in a beautiful family reunion”. With maturity, more personal, more expressive, more colorful and larger canvases arrive at Rauch, reaching what will become his favorite format of 2.5 m by 3 m, the most recent of which are exhibited in the cellars of MO.CO.
Always figurative, dotted with abstract elements and characters in old-fashioned clothes, they tell strange, sometimes disturbing stories, where the planes mingle and respond to each other, where the impossible perspectives let the visitor get lost and discover hidden details over the minutes needed to observe each of them and where references to an imaginary past are superimposed on elements of modernity.
Here, it’s a factory courtyard dominated by a chimney and populated by fantastic creatures and men in top hats, there a fight between giant beetles, perhaps a metaphor for the ambiguous relationship between two busy artists. to paint them. “It’s not about representing my dreams, what I’m looking for is to work as one dreams, with references that merge, without ranking them,” explains Neo Rauch. Pointing to a character depicted from behind who could be a deminer, he also says that “one must always be careful, when one exercises one’s art, in the face of political correctness”.
In a 2007 painting entitled Vater (Father), one of the most personal, Neo Rauch, who lost his parents very early in a train accident, represents himself as an adult, coiled like a baby in the arms of this missing father. Beside them, another representation of himself stares with a camera at a jewelry box from which his endless dreams escape.
