MILES (MEILEN)
soloexhibition
8 th. April - 14 th. May 2022
Heliumcowboy artspace - Hamburg
It is what it is: earth, crushed brick, lime, ash and soot.... "MILES" is a description of the structures and surface nature of our world. Satellite images - realistic, abstract, topographic. As soon as photos appear from space, they already seem to hold problematic substrates and essences: acid rain effects;, calcified, leached and eroding soils;, salinization;, heat fields;, karstification;, erosion;, clearing and devastation.
This is exactly what Jens Rausch is interested in - pictorial, processual, and material wise - and what he deals with in his works. Within this subject, he creates works full of experimentation, which Jens does 'for relaxation' in addition to his other series of works from the material digs, layers, erodes, oxidizes, flows or swirls. Each work is created on the basis of a unique pictorial idea. Jens Rausch gives the works titles that rather describe the respective processes and that he understands as a kind of work instruction of his craft: sinks, earth history, swirls, currents. This ambiguity is evident, for example, in the work titled "Stream," which shows a river course in a kind of nocturnal top view. With shimmering gold leaf and thus reminiscent of a circuit board, a light situation is created that materially as well as metaphysically stands for the energy flows of our time and is simultaneously juxtaposed with the natural course of the river.
It often remains vague in Jens Rausch's new pictorial worlds whether, for example, the cloud formations are industrial emissions, fires, or natural clouds of fog; if the structures are of artificial, of man-made origin, or whether they come from a natural source. As a painter, he transfers abstraction into reality here: the sometimes hazily applied veil of clouds indicates that here the abstraction was not generated merely by chance, material and structural properties, but that a concrete pictorial information is involved.
And this is exactly how Jens Rausch works: he triggers many of the processes artificially-artistically, creating what he refers to as continuous pictorial pieces, while sharpening the processual and individual parts meticulously. These processes have their origin in a kind of primordial mass, which Jens brings partly modeling on the canvas, paints, glues, mounts and then, for example, literally modeling combs through, leeches, etches, layers or washes off, the natural washouts and erosions. This is done appropriately with a comb, another thinning or layering device. He breaks the canvas or structured material masses again and again to create erosions, "earth cracks" and abrasions with it. Like the true history of the earth, Jens Rausch thus (re-)interprets or transforms his works materially, and in them he shows us the artificial and man-made and thus makes it literally comprehensible. One can grasp both structurally and haptically the scrapes, ridges and elevations in the works.
In his new series of works "MILES", Jens Rausch creates sceneries of a world that, in the image detail, again and again clearly harbor catastrophic developments. What seems peaceful and aesthetic from far away and on a small scale, in reality shows disastrous environmental developments: Iron-siltation, clearing, mineral prospecting, urban sprawl, desertification, the deprivation of natural resources. Limitations and demarcations, social and political, also flow into the pieces, a repeating theme in his works. Thus Jens Rausch creates with his landscape formations not least a kind of pictorial description of a constant change and fragility or brittleness of our habitual surface.
In the context of the solo exhibition "MILES" Jens Rausch shows those works partly arranged on the floor as a kind of map, even as an "eclectic" mind mapping, to which viewers experience access despite the rather large degree of abstraction of the painting.
Not least through the cognitive glasses of his own experiences and in his own inner location of a view of the earth from above, Jens Rausch's work changes our direction of vision several times and on many levels and thus turns the perspectives on a world known to us upside down in the truest sense, both materially and metaphysically.