INTRODUCING: BENNY DRÖSCHER BY MARTIN HERBERT FOR MODERN PAINTERS
INTRODUCING: Benny Dröscherby Martin Herbert for Modern Painters
I’m often lost in reverie,” says Benny Dröscher when asked to characterize his working practice, adding ambiguously that “the starting point is frequently my sense of wonder.” Yet the Danish sculptor, painter and occasional photographer is no wide-eyed naïf, however much his sunny aesthetic and pictorial vocabulary—birds, butterflies, fountains, trees, and mystical trappings such as stone circles and dreamcatchers—might indicate otherwise.
To begin with, Dröscher’s art disdains the credulity that’d make his art bong-friendly. Consider his 2005 sculpture, With my head bent auspiciously over the centre—it looks like a cartoon of a deterministic universe manned by some pagan controller, but diminishes the idea that this might be its awestruck ‘message’ by revealing itself as a layer cake of dissimulations. Fixed to the wall, a barky segment of tree outstretches two branching arms, each supporting a type of stringed cross used by puppeteers. The strings, festooned with Christmas-decoration stars, culminate at ground level in two fur rugs, tugged lightly upward like shaggy, faceless animals. And so the emblematic substitute (those ersatz stars) abut the theatrically faked (the hirsute creatures given potential life when jerked by strings), and the subtly deceptive (the tree, a sedulous sham). None of it is ‘real’, so to speak, but we’re more convinced by the tree because it seems relatively real. The idea inherent in this tiered realism—that in the face of a whopper, a subtler fib might pass—reflects Dröscher’s fascination with belief systems and audience manipulation: questions of why we choose to accept something or other as valid, and to what end, permeate his art.
What Dröscher wants, in fact, is to create an engagement with reality unencumbered by a priori categories. To lead us towards that place, though, he feels obligated to show us how these come about—doing so by taking things we have categorized as safe and/or unimportant and reactivating them through estrangement. Bonfires, for instance, which have in the past been centrepieces of pagan rituals and also ancient sites of storytelling—and, in the UK, are strongly associated with Bonfire Night, in which the story of a 17th-century plot to blow up Parliament has long been subsumed in carefree celebration around a giant pyre—first appeared in his work in 2001. A painted sculpture of frozen flames, Bonfire is a weirdly inert, oversized bauble that spotlights Dröscher’s formative interest in Pop. (“I loved it for its clarity,” he’s remarked.) But when the motif reappeared earlier this year in “Lurking for Transcendental Moments,” Dröscher’s first London show at Rokeby, in the form of Would you believe it if your child confessed to be an incarnation of your late mother (2007), it had turned unreal, carved flames leaping sideways from a central stack of modelled logs. If the bonfire has become a safe symbol, the artist admits as much—while pointedly restoring its strangeness.
On one level, then, Dröscher seeks to show that we can be seduced, through aesthetic tweaking, into seeing something convincingly odd and almost mystical in symbols that seem to have guttered out. This received effect, in his work, is thoroughly intermingled with the business of looking at art, which is similarly a matter of being convinced—by ambience, by technique. As humans, we’re primed to look for cause and significance, to see purpose in the illogical, Dröscher implies: the same neurons that fired to make us believe in religions can also do so in the name of art.
Connected to this exploration of how art convinces is the fact that, alongside his sculptures, he often exhibits paintings that swirl with the same imagistic repertoire. Both Dröscher’s canvas Speaking Softly about Important Issues (6) (2005) and his sculptural installation from the same year, I Am So Sick and Tired Having to Do Everything Myself—the latter dating from the time when the artist finally hired assistants to help realize his meticulous forgeries—feature arrangements of spindly tree-trunks and birds. The sculpture, though, involving a ritual circle and crystals, is neatly organised; the painting is a bouillabaisse of techniques, from sharp realism to messy gestural marks. If the sculpture privileges verisimilitude to theatrically reactivate its otherwise inert pagan symbolism, the painting argues for the same thing in a different, dreamier manner. An instinctive, confident sense of composition anchors the canvas; one is tempted to see it as painting-as-spell, as if its colliding aspects were combinatory ingredients thrown knowingly into a cauldron. The two formats reinforce each other, as Dröscher intends: “I’ve always enjoyed the strange play between making a physical object out of an image and vice versa,” he says. “Together in the same room, it’s hard to reject the imagery since it is actually there right next to you – both as an image and for real.”
So yes, we can easily be encouraged to put our trust in something irrational. But, again, Dröscher has a larger point to make, which has little to do with mysticism per se. If we accept or reject things irrationally, he suggests—if we consider them as relics, or as kitsch—we’re practicing a form of discrimination. He’s capable of extending this into a kind of equal-rights charter for physical phenomena: “We all stand in front of an artwork with a certain accumulation of information, ideas, even prejudices,” Dröscher continues. “If you’re going to communicate directly with what’s in front of you, these must be thrown away. Your normal way of understanding must be short-circuited, so you can speak in a non-verbal language.”
In order to put us in that place, Dröscher’s works constantly seek that fine point where logic is suspended but incoherence is also held in fragile abeyance. My Grandma relied on an endless source (2007) arranges spindly birch branches into a bower that surrounds an obviously unreal, sculpted waterfall. Again the elements exist on different representational levels. In part it feels like an imitation, in part like a real thing, a readymade; this prevents one from categorizing it easily. Which, for Dröscher, is the point: one is confronted with something which won’t be contained by words and definitions. “I love this place between reality and representation,” he says, “where there is doubt about how the world is turning, and whether we’re really seeing and interpreting it correctly.”
The result is a glimpse into the mystery of the uninscribed visual, its unknowability beyond what we can say about it. Dröscher’s art, then, is a looping process aimed at opening up perception. It begins in his own wonder—he evidently spends quite a bit of time spacing out in birch forests—and, after making visible our own propensity for being manipulated and pushing us towards an encounter with the fathomless, unmediated real, it ends there too. Accordingly, and while one hesitates to layer metaphorical readings onto Dröscher’s art, there’s something apt about his repeated deployment of one circular motif—a component in many of his paintings including the pointedly titled Speaking softly about important issues series (2005–ongoing): a loop, made by two forked birch branches meeting and curling around each other, which vignettes the star-laden infinity of the night sky.
—Martin Herbert