I first met Janus Hochgesand at the Karlsruhe Academy of
Fine Arts. We were both in Andreas Slominski’s class,
which had a great influence on both our work. Shortly after
the party that began the visiting professorship of Anselm
Reyle, Hochgesand switched to Tobias Rehberger at the
Städelschule in Frankfurt. We met again there, when he
was already moving away from sculpture to painting. At one
time he took an extended study trip to Mexico City.
The influence of bright colors can be seen in his work to
this day, but still he has yet to take up a paintbrush.
His paintings are created through physical action in the
horizontal. They are equivalent to acts of performance
that put the paint to work. Hochgesand doesn’t sit quietly
at his easel, painting; he throws the material onto the
ground where the painting develops. There is neither vision
nor sketch for this process; intuition and impulse are the
artistic tools here. Like in a game of chess, as he describes
it in an interview with Julia Voss,1 he prepares his materi-
als and begins with the first move—at the end of the game
the painting is finished.
For his exhibition at the Ludwig Museum Koblenz,
Janus Hochgesand decided on a Spanish title: Muy mucho,
a pun whose lexemes serve as an adverb in Spanish
usage. A literal translation might be “very much”—that is,
an exceptional relationship of quantity or quality.
Hochgesand works at his canvases with this aspiration
to intensity. He calls them “high-intensity paintings”; they
exhibit a density of form and content and a high concen-
tration of working time and material. Hochgesand makes
sure that his labor is visible in layers of application
and rub-off, presenting the image surface as a zone of
much successive reworking.
Janus Hochgesand paints abstract, expressionist
images bearing the hand- and footmarks of his intensive
physical way of working. Structures, textures and pig-
ments are central. Paint, for Hochgesand, is a composi-
tional element that he applies almost archaically with
hands and feet and tools like brooms or trowels. Shoes
and gloves enable him to work the canvas into submis-
sion. The painter’s gestural forcefulness leaves striking
imprints, traces, and shadings. Hochgesand applies
the acrylic paint or even the pure pigment from the tube
or bucket. He presses, rubs, smears, pulls, and wrests
his material around the canvas. He creates superimposi-
tions of color through folding and kneading the fabric,
and he sweeps accumulations of pigment back and forth.
At the same time the porous surface is further spiced
with pure pigment, placing strong emphases like flares
from under and between darker fields of color. This
creates impressionistic chromatic atmospheres of fullness
and emptiness, brightness and darkness. While the
dark surfaces radiate remoteness and calm, the vibrant
flares seem to splinter up close and are particularly
intense from a distance.
Janus Hochgesand’s painting confidently reveals
its inspiration: the aesthetic takes up the Abstract Expres-
sionism of the 1950s New York School together with
the European Informalism movement, and combines both
interests in a contemporary way. There are flashes of
visual relationship from Elaine and Willem de Kooning to
Joan Mitchell to the abstract paintings of Gerhard Richter.2
With his drip painting, sweeps of the broom, succinctly
cool spray effects, and body imprints, Hochgesand pays
homage to his neo-avant-garde predecessors—though
of course he only paints for himself, as he has found his
own way. But let us nevertheless indulge in the pleasure
of comparison and visualize works by Christopher Wool,
Julian Schnabel, or Sterling Ruby and Joe Bradley.
Hochgesand is another player in this international league.
How is he able to set his own standards of alteration and
liberation here? He doesn’t find his subject matter in sign
or object; he begins in the non-representational, and
ultimately succeeds in the creation of a painting that even
simulates illusion. Hochgesand has taken an individual
path in finding his own style on the way to the high level
of abstraction. He uses paint as material in such a way
that his images take on a haptic quality while still appear-
ing light and transparent. The chromatic range is dominated
by bright, shining tones, which are given an airy
background by the rough white grounding. Hochgesand
creates a visual depth in which distanced, meditative
viewing and an almost transcendental atmosphere can
be experienced.
The painting is created as a performance, which is
why Janus Hochgesand also enacts his work together
with musicians. The creative process becomes a
synesthetic experience for the audience, similar to Yves
Klein’s per formance of his work with invited musicians.
Hochgesand has even set up studio situations within his
recent exhibitions to display his way of working to small
live audiences on the Internet via livestream. His painting
process has been staged as a composition of sound
and color in interaction with the Nichiteanu Trio, making
the dynamism of the performed painting visible and
audible as a concert.
Painting as Confluence
I met Janus Hochgesand again in Koblenz, and
together we visited the presentation of the Ludwig Museum
collection. The metaphor of confluens can hardly be
better applied than here, where the Rhine and the Moselle
meet. We are grateful for the open-minded interest of
Beate Reifenscheid, director of the Ludwig Museum
Koblenz, who responded to our idea with such generosity.
She gave the artist the opportunity to stage a spatial
debate with art history within an outstanding collection in
his home town.
The exhibition at the Ludwig Museum Koblenz is
contrived as an intervention within the collection.
The museum holds one of the most important collections
of twentieth-century art in Germany, with works by the
postwar European and American avant-garde. A special
point of interest is the collection assembled from the
1960s onward by Peter and Irene Ludwig. The part of it
held at Koblenz is an important overview of German
and French conceptual painting. The exhibition of the
museum’s collection features key works of Pop Art,
Informalism and the École de Paris.
Alternating interventions by younger contemporary
artists are shown within this presentation. Particularly in
relationship to the development of art-historical canons
that occurs in collections, the confrontation of works by
modern masters and postwar avant-garde stars with
contemporary positions provides an opportunity to alter
established perspectives on art history.
Janus Hochgesand’s exhibition Muy mucho continues
this strategy of looking at the permanent presentation
of the collection in new ways.
Proceeding from the work of Janus Hochgesand,
the term “intervention” means a specific re-examination
of central modernist positions and styles, and of various
approaches to abstraction in painting. For his interventions,
Hochgesand has made an intensive study of similar
artistic positions preceding his own in the collection.
The result of this relational selection process challenges
the public in turn: what will be its response to a young
artist taking on the power of art history and seeking
confrontation?
Janus Hochgesand has chosen works from the
collection of the Ludwig Museum Koblenz that range
from modernism to the present and represent the various
tendencies of abstraction and conceptual painting.
They include works by Pablo Picasso, Asger Jorn, Willem
de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg,
Pierre Soulages, K.O. Götz, and Gerhard Hoehme. They
are confronted by a selection of twelve new paintings
by Janus Hochgesand, arranged in such a way that visual
axes and oblique connections arise. Stylistic breaks
and continuities in the material history of painting thus
obtain a new and surprising order.
1 See this publication, pp. 69–72, here p. 72.
2 See Bice Curiger (ed.), Birth of the Cool. American Painting from
Georgia O’Keeffe to Christopher Wool, exh. cat. Deichtorhallen
Hamburg, Kunsthaus Zürich, Ostfildern 1997; Kay Heymer, Susanne
Renner (eds.), Le grand geste! Informel und Abstrakter Expressionismus
1946
–
1964, exh. cat. Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Cologne 2010.
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