Meet ...
Jan-Ole Schiemann
Jan-Ole Schiemann takes us on a commented photo-tour through his studio in Cologne. His exhibition will be on show at Wentrup during Gallery Weekend Berlin 2020.
Text by Philipp Fernandes do Brito.
Based on a visual vocabulary of complex forms and surreal body fragments, Schiemann’s works oscillate playfully between the limits of abstract painting and anthropomorphic figuration. His pictorial worlds create a dense, sometimes transparent mesh that abandons the contours of clearly defined, special structures in favour of an ambivalent, cleverly interwoven composition.
All this associations seem to be appropriate to describe the mischievous formal game of hide and seek and disguise on the canvas through Jan-Ole Schiemann’s compositions evade the beholder’s gaze to the same degree to which they, just a moment later, reveal themselves as their own formal counterpart.
Schiemann’s large works emerge not just in a dialogue with their references, but also link themselves in a continuous interchange to a formal language created by the artist in drawings and watercolours.
In this language, pencil and ink organically outline details, dismember hybrid bodies, and link sections of lines – all this just to reshape themselves synthetically in the paintings in front of us into a wholly new visual universe.
The structures of the pictorial space, created associatively on the
basis of stencils and shadowy fields of ink, seem endless. They are delicately woven to form a superimposed net underneath the works, which, in the manner of collages, takes up the multiple references to comics, gestural abstraction, and early animation film in order to link them with references to Arshile Gorky’s post-cubist silhouettes or Carroll Dunham’s strangely fluid pictorial creatures.
The interplay between edged and angular and relaxed. A pictorial composition that in its ruptures turns its graphic lines inside out and interlocks them with an organic structure. Motifs that moves through the paintings dimly and like humorous caricatures.
