In Jens Rausch's new visual worlds, it often remains unclear whether the cloud formations are, for example, industrial emissions, fires or natural clouds. Whether the structures are of artificial, man-made origin or of natural origin. As a painter, he transfers abstraction into reality. The sometimes hazily applied veil of clouds indicates that the abstraction here was not merely generated by chance, from material and structural properties, but that it is a matter of concrete pictorial information.

This also forms the basis of Jens Rausch's painterly process: he triggers many of the processes artificially and artistically, repeatedly generates chance, continuously reacts to it in his painting, thereby sharpening the process and shaping individual sections, sometimes meticulously. These processes have their origin in a kind of primordial mass, which the artist applies to the canvas in part by modeling, painting, gluing, mounting and then literally modeling by combing, leaching, etching, layering or washing off, like natural washouts and erosions. In doing so, he breaks up the canvas or structured material masses again and again, creating erosions, "cracks in the earth" and abrasions, like the true history of the earth. Jens Rausch thus (re-)interprets or transforms his works again and again, depending on the material, and shows us the artificial and man-made. He thus makes everything literally comprehensible, because these abrasions, ridges and elevations can be wonderfully grasped structurally and extremely haptically.

In his new series of works "_MILES", Jens Rausch points to scenes of our world. What appears so peaceful and aesthetic from afar and on a small scale actually shows sometimes disastrous environmental developments and traces of human activity: Deforestation, digging, urban sprawl, desertification, the deprivation of natural resources. But limitations and boundaries, both social and political, also flow into the works. With his initially abstract-looking landscape paintings, Jens Rausch creates an extremely realistic painting of the constant change, fragility and brittleness of our earth's surface: processual, experimental and material.

Andreas Herrmann