Jochen Proehl’s Landscape World

The exhibition prepared by Jochen Proehl for the Millî Reasürans Art Gallery is on view from December 1, 2005 to January 7, 2006. A catalog in Turkish, German, and English was prepared for the exhibition with the sponsorship of BAUTEK.

The Millî Reasürans Art Gallery opens the season with an exhibition by the German artist Jochen Proehl. Jochen Proehl, who spent his childhood and early youth in Istanbul between 1967 and 1974, graduated from the Berlin School of Art in 1988. While continuing his artistic work, he has taught design, graphics, and pattern courses at various colleges and universities in Germany since 1996. He also conducted a workshop on experimental photography at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Marmara University, during 2003-2004. Proehl, who has held solo exhibitions in Germany and participated in group exhibitions in Europe and America, is a painter of urban "landscapes." However, unlike traditional landscape painters who focus on the visible scenery, his gaze is directed towards the ground. He roams the boulevards, streets, and vacant lots of the city; rather than capturing images that conquer the skies, he focuses on the mounds of excavated earth, traces of human civilization and erosion on the ground, pits dug in the soil, formations on the ground, and small holes filled with water. Although these areas document human's relentless destructiveness in their own living space and form "conquered" and usefully arranged witnesses of nature’s landscape, for Jochen Proehl, these areas create an aura that forms almost magical and new worlds. Despite or because of the opened wounds, this aura represents a power and vitality that can be expressed through art.

Jochen Proehl asks, "How can I realize a painting that engages with the viewer’s experiential world while looking forward, without merely repeating a past art?" and answers this question with a painting that does not dismiss natural motifs but instead finds an imaginal equivalent for a complex nature experience by circulating around and obscuring this motif. Close-up views of natural fragments transform into constructivist painting disciplines where paint densities mutually define each other, evolving into depersonalized paint-surface-compositions. These are neither fully representational nor figurative; yet, they are not abstract either. In these surprisingly simple motifs, the artist finds metaphors for nature’s boundlessness. Although nature thus loses its definiteness, it achieves a completely unknown unity. His paintings reveal a potential for sensory and visual experience that transcends the traditions of the object world, guiding the viewer towards a truly perceptive vision; nature becomes an event experienced by the eye. As sculptor Norbert Kricke once described, "nature speaks for itself through the artist."

Every brush or pencil movement by Jochen Proehl in transferring the object to abstraction is essentially an invention of the image or, in terms of the fundamental issue of painting, a slight approximation to the real nature of things beyond their visible surface. As Hans-Jürgen Schwalm describes, “As frequently seen in Jochen Proehl’s canvases, the act of painting a simple and inconspicuous motif—almost unworthy of the canvas—becomes a form that, despite the painter’s freedom, solidifies the painter’s gesture into a binding, enduring shape. Glittering brush strokes overlap, spatially vibrating the surface of the image. The artist’s method of applying paint to the canvas, the apparently abandoned brushstrokes, and the illusionary perspective break the image and bring the ground element back to the surface. Two inconspicuous holes in the ground suddenly capture our attention, arouse our curiosity, and direct our gaze and thoughts towards the unfathomable depths of a different world. Jochen Proehl redefines reality. His paintings explore the possibilities of paint as the actual medium of painting’s real form. Color defines things, conquers space, and creates an imaginal structure. Color is form, and form is color, or in other words: Color creates itself from paint and takes form. The ‘fury’ of the painting hand, while chasing gods and demons with a brush or pencil, places a sensory experience of painting that creates a tense balance between surface and space, paint and form, objectivity and abstraction, and the brush’s signature with the invocation of light.