Jonas Burgert‘s new exhibition won’t open until next April @ Berlin’s BlainSouthern Gallery but 2011 saw four more theatrical pieces of this German’s attempts at explaining human life.
In its impossible quest to resolve our nature origins, he opens doors to every sphere of reason, imagination and desire. Oversized canvases are peopled with fantastical creatures of unlikely proportions. Some are towering, gigantic figures, others as small as infants. The cast includes monkeys and zebras, skeletons and harlequins, amazons, children, sometimes even the painter himself.
A contemporary El Bosco (Bosch) with a particular passion for masks, acid colors and inexplicable baroque darkness.
According to Burgert, humanity’s need to find a meaning in existence beyond the corporeal creates an intense desire for an overarching narrative; a unifying theme that invests our lives with purpose: “In our mind, we create existences as heroes, gods or clowns. They lead unbearably loud, malicious, cynical, witty and passionate lives, in wonderfully strange or terrible places. In my art, I merely try to paint the scene of this ongoing process of debate and negotiation, with all its peculiarities.”
He’s probably read Stephen King’s IT too many times when adolescent, and while his late April exhibition arrives to south-west Berlin we’ll try ourselves to find some universal meaning in Burgert’s work. It’s “always the same painting, in the end” as he puts it, so it can’t be that complicated…
