René Luckhardt
24 Jan - 28 Feb 2009
RENÉ LUCKHARDT
"La vie printanière"
24th January - 28th Febuary 2009
„The spring-like life“ is for René Luckhardt not primarily a large concept, rather a large picture. La vie printanière stands out from the other paintings due to its size of approx. 5 x 2.5 m. This area is for the most part only thinly covered with colour, which lets the white background shine through and is left blank in many places. More than just a showplace, a whole world opens up within this exhibition. It is not for nothing that La vie printanière gives the exhibition its title.
A round dance circles a centre. A Gesamtkunstwerk bundles all the rays from its periphery into an altarpiece for example. In the exhibition La vie printanière there is so little architectural, so little iconographic to read that in contrast every picture finds its place and its sense in that which makes it stand out from the others. Therefore the large picture not only has the title of the exhibition, it also really contains the time-space that René Luckhardt opens up.
A time-space in painting is a light-space. The Woman who recurs in several paintings as the "Grandmother", opens up this light-space in La vie printanière. The old woman’s breasts in the upper middle of the picture droop onto a yellow circle, which flows downwards and from which protrude the three young women. While the old woman is immersed in the golden light, which illuminates her face from below, the three lying, crouching, sitting women are presented in an uneasy light like in a night club. Their agitated posing lets their individuality and injury emerge much more than it fractures it. The return to the unit, which was first composed if you like in the knots in the old woman’s hair, succeeds only in abandoning the awareness that what the old woman is immersed in, is alienated in the young ones. In the blooms which encompass the composition spherically to the left and right, the round dance which immerses people in unhappiness, disengages itself.
The picture therefore embodies the idea of emanation in a new way: The one but feminine awareness is immersed in another, but also in one being. This being is divided into three. The division is unhappiness, in the sense that the women are only for others, for men and for viewers. This unhappy awareness is freed in the round dance of the blooms. This is a contrast between the cumbersome, depraved body weight of the women on the ground and the exhilarated rise of the plants which unite somewhere above with the awareness, where it all started from!
The idea of emanation, that everything comes from one origin, suffers and is released, in that it finds itself back there, is nothing new. René Luckhardt however formulates this in a little known way: the fact that the one awareness corresponding to the one origin is that of a woman. The course of things is inverted: after age follows youth and after youth follows the bloom. And no human optimism reaches as far as what the picture tells us: a return of innocence, literally an inverted deflowering.
The idea of emanation combines the appearance of things with their origin. This combination corresponds to the combination of that which Wolfgang Schöne calls “Eigenlicht” (original light) and “Beleuchtungslicht” (reflected light) in painting. In La vie printanière this combination is palpable in the yellow middle of the picture and its reflection on the countenance of the woman. The time-space which corresponds to this light-space is not only historically the distance between Cimabue and Giotto. It’s this distance, which is also known as Renaissance, which is formulated anew by René Luckhardt: Life which is spring-like is also always the life of spring.
Berthold Reiß
"La vie printanière"
24th January - 28th Febuary 2009
„The spring-like life“ is for René Luckhardt not primarily a large concept, rather a large picture. La vie printanière stands out from the other paintings due to its size of approx. 5 x 2.5 m. This area is for the most part only thinly covered with colour, which lets the white background shine through and is left blank in many places. More than just a showplace, a whole world opens up within this exhibition. It is not for nothing that La vie printanière gives the exhibition its title.
A round dance circles a centre. A Gesamtkunstwerk bundles all the rays from its periphery into an altarpiece for example. In the exhibition La vie printanière there is so little architectural, so little iconographic to read that in contrast every picture finds its place and its sense in that which makes it stand out from the others. Therefore the large picture not only has the title of the exhibition, it also really contains the time-space that René Luckhardt opens up.
A time-space in painting is a light-space. The Woman who recurs in several paintings as the "Grandmother", opens up this light-space in La vie printanière. The old woman’s breasts in the upper middle of the picture droop onto a yellow circle, which flows downwards and from which protrude the three young women. While the old woman is immersed in the golden light, which illuminates her face from below, the three lying, crouching, sitting women are presented in an uneasy light like in a night club. Their agitated posing lets their individuality and injury emerge much more than it fractures it. The return to the unit, which was first composed if you like in the knots in the old woman’s hair, succeeds only in abandoning the awareness that what the old woman is immersed in, is alienated in the young ones. In the blooms which encompass the composition spherically to the left and right, the round dance which immerses people in unhappiness, disengages itself.
The picture therefore embodies the idea of emanation in a new way: The one but feminine awareness is immersed in another, but also in one being. This being is divided into three. The division is unhappiness, in the sense that the women are only for others, for men and for viewers. This unhappy awareness is freed in the round dance of the blooms. This is a contrast between the cumbersome, depraved body weight of the women on the ground and the exhilarated rise of the plants which unite somewhere above with the awareness, where it all started from!
The idea of emanation, that everything comes from one origin, suffers and is released, in that it finds itself back there, is nothing new. René Luckhardt however formulates this in a little known way: the fact that the one awareness corresponding to the one origin is that of a woman. The course of things is inverted: after age follows youth and after youth follows the bloom. And no human optimism reaches as far as what the picture tells us: a return of innocence, literally an inverted deflowering.
The idea of emanation combines the appearance of things with their origin. This combination corresponds to the combination of that which Wolfgang Schöne calls “Eigenlicht” (original light) and “Beleuchtungslicht” (reflected light) in painting. In La vie printanière this combination is palpable in the yellow middle of the picture and its reflection on the countenance of the woman. The time-space which corresponds to this light-space is not only historically the distance between Cimabue and Giotto. It’s this distance, which is also known as Renaissance, which is formulated anew by René Luckhardt: Life which is spring-like is also always the life of spring.
Berthold Reiß