FAILURE ?...AND THEN WHAT?
Failure ... and then what?Approaching the paintings of Roger Wardin
»His eye is a magic wand, which lends all things a magical character. One believes one glimpses lost cities, forests where spirits dwell.
(...) This mixture of fantasy and precise clarity
is particular to dreams. Th is master’s originality
(...) proves itself in that the manner of
painting seems to correspond with the level of
fantasy. Of the magical world it may not be
spoken more loudly or boldly.«
Max J. Friedländer on Caspar David Friedrich
Outgrowths of destruction and failure set the tone of Roger Wardin’s most recent paintings, the subject matter initially seems dark and hopeless. The artist is interested in places where crimes have been committed, in landscapes where people’s expeditions have failed and in people from the National Socialist period, which symbolize both an ideal and its elusiveness.
Wardin gets his visual stimulation from different media and eras. Paintings from the 18th century, such as Monk by the Sea by the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich, inspires the painter the same way the fantastic literature of the Russian brothers Arkadi and Boris Strugatzki does, or the fi lms of the American director David Lynch or incidental photographs in the internet do, not to mention the inspiration from personal family photographs or documentary recordings of German history.
When Wardin uses a photograph for a composition’s point of departure, he reworks the image on the computer and often projects parts of it directly onto the canvas. Some motifs, in contrast, are created in the fi rst work phase with the primarily dark acrylic ground. Oil and spray paint are usually used for additional important accents, the lighting composition or the final touches added in later work phases. Wardin often tests out his subject matter as small variations. At the end, in his best works, monumental momentary views are created. Until a year ago the artist executed works concerned with light and color interchanges and the clear form of secular structures such as gas stations. The appearance of these buildings, however, became more and more abysmal. Since that time, his concern has shifted to places in which incomprehensible things have happened. These are deserted buildings, ruins, and destroyed landscapes, which no longer provide lonely creatures with a home or stability.
Strange lighting conditions shine through buildings and landscapes. Often it is several bodies of light that lend the scenes a surrealistic character. Are these witnesses from another world, aliens, or a promise of the future? Peculiar graphic structures emerge. Lights, which seem to be burnt into the canvas, sometimes even as cones of light, merely allow one to differentiate between light and dark, and situations seem to be frozen, as in a still from a film.
If the blurred forms have the character of the photographic reminiscences of a Gerhard Richter and the structures and compositions, particularly in the genre paintings with groups of children, have something of the roguish quality of a Sigmar Polke, then, when it comes to the subject matter of Roger Wardin’s apocalypses, one can be reminded of the German expressionist Ludwig Meidner. If political threats were the point of origin for this painter a century ago, then today there are a thousand reasons for employing the theme of the apocalypse. Deserted landscapes, abandoned buildings, forsaken creatures – Roger Wardin evokes decline in his most recent paintings, without giving up hope completely. Like the painters of the German Romantic, in particular Caspar David Friedrich, the black shadow is opposed to the glowing strength of light. For the painters of the German Romantic this strength provided comfort, promised recovery from troubled times, inspired by religious thought. In the end light prevails on the horizon in Wardin’s works as well, holding the upper hand over the darkness of failure in the, at times, apocalyptic seeming compositions. Whence this source comes is seldom the subject matter of artists in the 21st century, and Roger Wardin, too, consciously leaves this open to debate.
Sebastian Schwarzenberger, art historian
Translation: Marie Frohling