Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it is high time that we decipher together the phenomenon of Neo Rauch, this enigmatic German painter who offers us a pictural universe as disturbing as it is irresistible. Between his characters set in a choreography of the absurd and his industrial landscapes with colors as sweet as poisoned candies, Rauch holds out a deforming mirror where modernity and history collide without ever truly embracing.
Born in 1960 in Leipzig, orphaned at four weeks after the tragic death of his parents in a railway accident, Rauch embodies the figure of the artist fashioned by absence. This original void seems to have opened in him a temporal rift, an interstice where eras collide with the silent violence of a lucid nightmare. It is no coincidence that his figures always seem to float in a between, as if suspended between two states of consciousness.
Each canvas by Rauch is a theatrical scene where a play is performed whose actors themselves do not know the script. These characters with the appearance of automatons, dressed in anachronistic uniforms or outdated work clothes, busy themselves with tasks whose meaning escapes us. They are like sleepwalkers in a world that resembles the night but obeys different physical and social laws.
What strikes immediately in the work of Neo Rauch is its troubled relationship with architecture and space. Impossible not to think of Gaston Bachelard’s fulgurant analysis of the poetics of space when observing these vertiginous compositions where the interior and the exterior interpenetrate without apparent logic. As Bachelard wrote, “space seized by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subjected to the measurement and reflection of the geometer. It is lived” [1]. For Rauch, this lived space is that of a fragmented, kaleidoscopic collective memory, where factory chimneys rub shoulders with baroque churches, where perspectives collapse like houses of cards.
The industrial landscapes that often serve as a backdrop for his paintings are not without evoking this “topophilia” that Bachelard speaks of, this “love of space” that attaches itself to places inhabited by consciousness. Except that in Rauch, these places are impregnated with a post-Soviet melancholy, as haunted by the unfulfilled promises of an industrial modernity that collapsed with the Berlin Wall. The factory chimneys that punctuate his canvases are not merely architectural elements, but totems of a defunct religion, that of technological progress as collective salvation.
Rauch’s colors constitute a language in their own right. These candy pinks, these acidic yellows, these electric blues contrast with the gravity of the scenes depicted. It is as if Rauch had decided to paint tragedies with the palette of an advertisement for Italian ice cream from the 50s. This chromatic discordance produces an effect of distancing that is not without recalling Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater. As Brecht himself explained: “Distancing transforms the spectator’s approving attitude, based on identification, into a critical one” [2]. In Rauch, this distancing forces us to question our own relationship with recent history, particularly that of divided Germany.
Neo Rauch stands at the crossroads of several pictorial traditions, absorbing them to better subvert them. One can sense the influence of socialist realism in the monumentality of certain characters, but stripped of all militant heroism, as if emptied of their ideological substance. There is also something surrealistic about it, but a surrealism that has renounced the joyful dreaminess of a Dali to embrace a darker, more controlled, almost clinical vision. “Surrealism lives in contradiction,” wrote André Breton [3], and it is precisely in this contradictory interstice that Rauch’s work is situated, neither entirely figurative nor abstract; neither nostalgic nor futuristic; neither narrative nor hermetic.
Take, for example, his painting “Die Fuge” (2007). In the foreground, two characters manipulate strange instruments while in the background, an improbable architectural structure seems to be both collapsing and under construction. The title refers to the musical form of the fugue, this complex contrapuntal construction where voices echo each other, but also to the idea of flight or interstice. This polysemy is typical of Rauch who likes to play on the multiple possible levels of reading of his works.
The political ambivalence of Neo Rauch deserves a closer look. Raised in the GDR (German Democratic Republic), trained in the East German academic system before the fall of the Wall, Rauch experienced from within a totalitarian system that he is careful not to praise. But unlike other artists of his generation, he did not unreservedly embrace the values of Western capitalism. This in-between position earned him criticism, notably from art historian Wolfgang Ullrich who accused him of leaning towards a form of conservatism. Rauch responded with a painting depicting a critic defecating in a chamber pot, proof if ever there was that political neutrality is not synonymous with lack of temperament!
This political dimension is reflected even in his technique. Unlike many contemporary artists who delegate the execution of their works to assistants, Rauch paints every square centimeter of his canvases. This refusal of the division of labor can be read as a form of resistance to the capitalist production system, a nearly artisanal attachment to the materiality of the work. As Hannah Arendt points out in “The Human Condition”, “the work of our hands, as opposed to the labor of our bodies the homo faber who makes, who ouvrages, as opposed to the animal laborans who toils and assimilates fabricates the infinite variety of objects whose sum constitutes the human artifice” [4]. Rauch is resolutely on the side of the homo faber, of the maker who transforms matter into meaning.
What I like about Rauch is that he creates universes that seem to obey a rigorous internal logic while remaining fundamentally opaque to the viewer. His canvases are like closed, self-sufficient systems that do not need our understanding to exist. This autonomy of the work of art, Theodor Adorno had theorized it by speaking of “enigmaticity” as an essential characteristic of true art: “Artworks share with riddles this ambiguity of being determined and undetermined. They are riddles because they break what they could be while maintaining it” [5].
The recurrent figures in Rauch’s work, these men in uniform, these anonymous workers, these women with androgynous appearances, are not characters in the narrative sense, but rather archetypes, incarnations of existential postures. They remind me of what Carl Jung said about archetypes: “The archetype is a tendency to form representations of a motif representations that can vary considerably in detail without losing their basic pattern” [6]. Rauch draws from this reservoir of primordial images to construct a world that seems both familiar and strange to us.
In “Hutter der Nacht” (2014), a painting exhibited at David Zwirner, we find this archetypal quality. A man in a dark suit stands in a nocturnal landscape, holding what seems to be a lantern. Is he a guardian? A watchman? A guide? All these interpretations are possible, but none exhaust the meaning of the image. It is precisely this interpretive openness that makes Rauch’s work rich.
Neo Rauch himself describes his creative process as a form of trance, a meditative state where images emerge from a “white fog” that he must seize and bring to the surface. “I consider myself a kind of peristaltic filter system in the river of time,” he said [7]. This organic metaphor is revealing: the artist as a body traversed by flows that he filters and transforms, rather than as an all-powerful demiurge.
This humility in the face of the creative process contrasts with the arrogance of so many contemporary artists who pose as prophets of a world vision. Rauch, on the other hand, seems to accept being the medium of a reality that surpasses him, that he does not claim to master intellectually. “A painting should be smarter than its painter,” he asserts [8], thus reversing the traditional hierarchy between the artist and his work.
What touches me deeply in Rauch’s work is his ability to create images that resist our era of accelerated visual consumption. In a world saturated with images that are exhausted in a click, his paintings require time, attention, a form of abandonment. They remind us that truly seeing is an act that engages our entire being, not just our retina. As John Berger wrote, “seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” [9]. Rauch brings us back to this primary, preverbal vision, where the world appears to us in all its strangeness.
Neo Rauch is a painter whose work escapes easy categorization. Neither entirely contemporary nor anachronistic; neither abstract nor strictly figurative; neither conceptual nor naive, he occupies a singular territory in the current artistic landscape. And that is perhaps his greatest success: having created an immediately recognizable pictorial universe, a parallel world that obeys its own physical and metaphysical laws.
For you who contemplate his canvases with a mixture of fascination and perplexity, do not seek so much to understand them as to let yourself be captivated by them. Like portals to an alternative reality where our recent history, with its collapsed utopias and unfinished dreams, is replayed according to a different scenario. It is a world where East and West, past and future, everyday life and myth coexist in a strange discordant harmony. A world that reminds us that our reality, the one we take for granted, is perhaps only one version among others of the possibilities that inhabit us.
So the next time you come across a Rauch canvas in a museum or gallery, take the time to lose yourself in it. Let yourself be destabilized by these improbable colors, these broken perspectives, these weightless figures. For as Klee so rightly said, “art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible” [10]. And what Rauch makes visible is perhaps that irreducible part of strangeness that lies at the very heart of our modernity.
- Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957.
- Brecht, Bertolt. A Short Organum for the Theatre. Paris: L’Arche, 1963.
- Breton, André. Manifesto of Surrealism. Paris: Gallimard, 1924.
- Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1961.
- Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Paris: Klincksieck, 1974.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. Man and His Symbols. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1964.
- Rauch, Neo, cited in “Neo Rauch: Comrades and Companions”, documentary film by Nicola Graef, 2016.
- Rauch, Neo, interview with Paul Laster, Conceptual Fine Arts, 2019.
- Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Paris: Alain Moreau, 1976.
- Klee, Paul. Theory of Modern Art. Paris: Denoël, 1985.
