FROM: REVELRIES AND EXPECTATIONS: THE PAINTINGS OF CHRISTIAN ACHENBACH BY MARK GISBOURNE
The dense picture world of Christian Achenbach’s evocative paintings are often filled with allusions to staged musical performance, film and fantasy, inferred aspects of the comical occult, whose dominant aesthetic is that shaped by transgression and a feeling for historical anarchy and the culture of the carnivalesque.Achenbach’s syncopated universe of paint and colour opens up an extraordinarily frenetic visual world to the viewer, one which forges together forms and feelings, and added to these are any number of spatial complexities cast within a dynamic sense of reverberating emotional flux.
One thing is certain namely that his paintings are not intended to be shaped or driven by any immediately intended conceptual strategies, and neither are they at any point pictorially static as witnessed by their continuously shifting sense of fluid representation. They are not meant to be read as paintings of passive contemplation so much as pictures of intense vitality and invigoration. In short they represent an ongoing series of differentiated explosive manifestations, expressive vehicles of sensory overload reminiscent of carnival celebrations and breathless musical jamborees.
In Achenbach’s paintings we are often presented with a plethora of iconographic sources that are appropriated and reconvened into unique and highly personal individual tableaux, and if they are in any way Baroque, it is because they share certain stylistic affinities to theatricality and continuous movement. And it is this intoxicating Dionysian aspect of dance and movement (ecstatic or otherwise), with its expressive pleasure and perceptive proximities, which is distinct from conventional Apollonian desires that seek to determine an ordered or fixed pictorial reading and/or contemplative comprehension.