A landscape picture. Graceful, with an impressionistic flair and intense colors. The blue in the foreground suggests a zoomed-in body of water. Behind it is a dense stand of trees through which the sun shines. Sometimes in a yellow-white morning mood, sometimes in fiery orange and red tones.
Lars Theuerkauff calls the series he created this year “Flood”. In times of climate change, we are used to other flood images. So where does the absurd romanticism come from? The templates were designed by an artificial intelligence using the word flood. Apparently the generative AI program has learned to spare us humans. The catastrophe is hidden. The original version was probably even more harmonious.
Painting with a toothbrush
Lars Theuerkauff distorts the results of the AI by photographing them and rubbing the lens with oil or using thick glass as a kind of filter. The supposed idyll of the acrylic paintings takes on something disturbing in the painting process, and the real flood disasters appear before our inner eye as if in an afterimage. The artist, born in Lüneburg in 1968, increases the polarity of delicate paint application and rough themes through his techniques. He paints with his hands and fingers, uses toothbrushes and cleaning cloths instead of brushes, and achieves impressive virtuosity and his own style.
Experiments with the perception of AI also question the twists and turns of today’s visual worlds between fake and real elements in series such as “Kim Novak Helicopter Crash” or “Eberswalder Straße 29, 10437 Berlin”. In “Vincent Sturmvogel”, Theuerkauff brings together art history and the present. Strange flying creatures roam through typical Van Gogh wheat fields with sky or stars. Their appearance resembles a cross between a drone and a raven, but not really capable of flying. The templates are one and a half years old, the technology of that time is long outdated: today’s AI would be much more precise.
The boy’s pale skin
Other series presented in the extensive exhibition “We are 70% water” at Galerie Tammen were created based on posts from social media. Here, too, Theuerkauff – who studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and film at the Berlin University of the Arts – moves subtly between a political background and an original painterly attitude. He reflects current events in world affairs and the latest technological developments and impressively evades the dictum that painting is no longer relevant to the world.
An attractive man lies on his back in “Emporio Armani”. His head is tilted to the side, wearing only his Armani underpants. You would think he was asleep. Were it not for his pale skin, the red welts on his arms and the number 22 in the middle of his chest. Only gradually do we realize that all life has gone from this body. Corpse number 22? A soldier? Perhaps from the 22nd Regiment, and why is he naked except for his underpants? Thoughts of the victims of cruel violence come to mind. War and torture.
The interplay of evenly painted skin and the pointillist areas surrounding the figure and the yellow-gold glittering contours entice you to look closer. Then the white fabric, which at first looks like a blanket, turns out to be a body bag; the dark pattern at the top of the picture is a stylized street pavement.
Finds from social media
Attractive and disturbing at the same time, we cannot escape the precise and questioning gaze. The gentle blurring of the color and the light veils make the contours and surfaces appear soft and give the motifs something aesthetic. An aesthetic, however, that triggers contradictory feelings.
Theuerkauff uses the finds from social media without editing them. The brutal reality lurks beneath and between the supposedly beautiful surfaces. The freezers with the bright red Coca Cola advertisements that demand our attention until the bodies lying between them come into focus. Victims of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.
In contrast to this are the young men in swimming trunks, showing off their well-trained muscles. Their playful exuberance is counteracted by the slightly pale colors and the subtle blurring, which turns the cheerfulness into something uncomfortable. The selfies and posts come from Russia and Ukraine. From the time before the Russian war of aggression. “Flesh” is the title of the series. In memory of young Russians who demonstrated against their forced recruitment with the slogan “We are not flesh”.
It remains unclear whether the young people in the pictures are still alive, lying in the trenches of one or the other warring party, or have already been killed as cannon fodder. It is these empty spaces that make Lars Theuerkauff’s paintings so powerful. They raise questions about the human condition and touch us. Because the element of water decides between life and death. Of people and of nature.