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Saint Louis based print work shop All Allong Press is editioning prints by Wilhelm Neusser.

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Potemkin Worlds

by Joachim Geil

The realism of Wilhelm Neusser’s paintings is the kind that not only catches the eye, but slaps the viewer right across the face. Already in his titles, Neusser conjures up parallel worlds. He bids farewell to the strictures of the German language and enters a realm of humor and quick insight. The titles strike the reader like bolts of lightning. In Neusser’s artistic technique, language and painterly style intertwine, sowing seeds of subversion beneath a seemingly holistic surface. The architectural compositions and objects, shown in perspectival spaces in a seemingly favorable light, feel deceptive and heterogeneous. Their assembly remains contingent. It is impossible to say whether these are parallel worlds or eternal construction sites with façades like stage scenery. All that remains is uncertainty, lurking between the vanishing points.

The constructions depicted in Neusser’s paintings are hybrids of architectural models and ruins. With their obsessive coloring and ostentatious plasticity akin to the TV logos of a bygone age, they sound the death knell for representational bourgeois art. In grotesque arrangement, that is, in their rebellious disengagement from the system, these life-like objects tear open abysses, leading the viewer into the pale dreamscapes of the surrealists. With cancerous malignancy, they seem to be assembling themselves, spreading out in all directions.

The system of representational painting overlying Neusser’s compositions like a veil is in a state of dissolution. Again and again, perspective is broken, drawing attention to the vulnerability of the scene and confusing the eye. A sense of terror casually permeates the paintings. It is painting’s fantasy of omnipotence viewed through the prism of irony. Proportionality, one of the basic tenets of realist art, is systematically deconstructed. The moment they are perceived, Neusser’s objects clearly stop pretending that they are particular objects, but they do so only vaguely.

Pure painting takes over, echoing Max Ernst. It unmasks illusionary depth as a theatrical set that has become unhinged, revealing the horror of monochrome surfaces looming behind it. The earth also opens up and where one expects the reflection of a house on the surface of a garden pond, the picture of a completely different object appears that might not be a reflection at all. Neusser’s references to the ‘my-home-is-my-castle’ mentality of middle-class men with model railroads in their basement show this culture as alternating between an obsession with detail and claustrophobic uniformity. In Neusser’s paintings, the role of the faceless mannequins in Giorgio de Chirico's 'metaphysical art', who inhabit public spaces between the long shadows of spindly arcatures, is played by the chimerical walls, boxes, props and houses themselves.

The only certitude we can draw from this laboratory of the uncanny is the assurance that comes from reading the paintings’ captions, namely that these pictures were made in oil on canvas by an artist named Neusser .

Wilhelm Neusser was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1976. He studied with Professor Harald Klingelhöller at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Cologne. In 2007 he was awarded the prestigious ZVAB Phönix art prize.

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The Last Images of Humanity

by Jan Brandt

The painter Wilhelm Neußer is a master of subtle horror. In his fantastic, nightmarish oil paintings he turns the world and our perception of it on its head.

The world’s largest ocean liner embarks on its first, and last, voyage. A giant made of steel and wood, born of the desire to replicate the world on a smaller scale and to defy the forces of nature; a modern, mobile microcosm with squash courts and a pool, salons and libraries, en route to ruin with more than 2200 people on board. On 14 April, passengers looking out through the portholes only a few miles away from the fateful collision with the iceberg would have seen clear blue skies and an ocean without any trace of ice, having no premonitions of the calamity about to strike in the North Atlantic night.

The sinking of the Titanic is arguably the most frequently depicted disaster in the history of seafaring. It was often used as a clear and dramatic illustration of human hubris. Ever since, the terms “unsinkable” and “Titanic” have been inextricably linked. The sinking of the Titanic is an event where the impossible and the possible meet. The young painter Wilhelm Neußer, born in Cologne in 1976, succeeds in showing just that – the possible-impossible suddenly becomes visible, hidden human desires and fears are exposed and the viewer is led into realms forever hidden from “normal” human perception.

Unlike many other artists such as Willy Stöwer, a naval draftsman in imperial Germany, or the young Max Beckmann, both of whom dealt with the Titanic motif as early as 1912, Neußer does not look at the sinking vessel from the outside – he delves into the cabins of the doomed passengers and turns their perspective into his own. However, his “Titanic” is not a depiction of real events. What he shows is not what the ship’s passengers would have seen on that Sunday in April, but what awaits them. His neo-romantic, Caspar David Friedrich-style depiction of a treacherous idyll goes far beyond any garish horror scenario. It is not only the clouds and the ice floes that spell danger – under the dark layer of paint, the prolonged edges of the floes create little ridges reaching into the hull of the vessel. It is as if their sharp edges are boring into the ship’s skin and from there into the viewers’ eyes.

All of Wilhelm Neußer’s works grow out of the “Titanic dream”, the primordial motivation of all designers and artists – to replicate the world, his world, in two or three dimensions and at a smaller scale. And, if human beings cannot be mastered, to at least be the master of landscapes and things and to shape and arrange them in his own fashion. To do this, Neußer uses a variety of motifs in different combinations. Rocks, plants, planes, spheres, tape and cardboard boxes are used not as actual signifiers, but as quotes with a variety of meanings. “I play around with my treasury of elements, and while I am doing this I always have some words in mind, words I associate with these elements. They often become titles for my paintings in the process,” Neußer says. “Often I start out with a word and then use my treasury of elements to compose my painting.”

The associations evoked by the titles of his latest works, painted in 2005 and 2006 – “Eigenheimphantasie” (“Home-owning fantasy”), “Draußen nur Kännchen” (“Only large coffees outside”), “Vorschriften einhalten” (“Observing rules”), “Insolvenz” (“Insolvency”) or “Pleite” (“Gone bust”) – are no less uncanny than those conjured up by “Titanic”, because the fear of yet another “sinking” manifests itself in them, the fear of the middle classes of coming down in the world. The metaphors Neußer has found for this fear that permeates society are spot-on and shocking at the same time. There are upside-down houses, staircases that should go up but instead go down into the basement, allowing people to walk on their underside, illuminated half-finished buildings, thin layers of ground that are cut off like boards, ripped barrier tape, shutters that are only half closed, and there are cardboard boxes everywhere. All of them are images of profound insecurity, a feeling that is very widespread in today’s society.

If you consider title and motif together, you will notice a deliberate dissonance. In “Eigenheimphantasie” (“Home-owning fantasy”), the dream of becoming a homeowner has congealed into a brick sculpture with a clamp growing out of a cardboard box – a symbol of the unfinished, stunted dream, of a hope that has become impossible to keep alive. “Draußen nur Kännchen” (“Only large coffees outside”) alludes to the problem of having rules – even if they are inconsistent with each other – for almost everything that become ridiculous once their raison d’être no longer exists. Neußer shows this by painting new elements over the old ones like on a palimpsest, an ancient parchment or papyrus that was scraped and reused to save paper without rendering the original writings totally unreadable. As the viewer moves closer to the painting, more eerie details emerge – a coffee cup on the left, the faint silhouette of a pair of glasses in the foreground – only shadows now, traces of a past that is gone forever, a vague memory of better days that is slowly fading, of days when coffee pots used to sit on café tables instead of in boxes.

Neußer really comes into his own with paintings such as “Gone bust” or “Insolvency” where he guides the viewers’ eyes to places they should not be able to see at the same time – simultaneously looking up at and down upon a broken-apart and divided world on a plane with a large cut-out. The house, the commoner’s castle, is turned into a treacherous pit. The plants, which are supposed to make the garden more beautiful, either tower into the skies or droop, completely denuded of their leaves, as if into a precipice.

These images of ruin depict more than the fear of coming down in the world – they are harbingers of doom, the apocalypse, complete annihilation, the extinction of the bourgeoisie and humanity in general. There are no human beings in the paintings, yet their presence is always felt, looking at what they have left behind as if fleeing from something terrible. While some of Neußer’s older works from 2004 such as “Kommen lassen” (“Let it grow”) and “Modell Erfolgshochschule” (“School of success”) seem to be a sort of laboratory of futuristic architecture, the general atmosphere in his latest paintings is more melancholic and more utopian. These paintings are of non-locations. Fantastic post-modern dreamworlds. Strange and disturbing visualisations of the impossible-possible.



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