Reinhard Gäde

Reinhard Gäde				Gallery II			March 1 - March 26, 2008

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	Complex Beauty: The Work of Reinhard Gade When Reinhard Gade paints subjects, objects or situations that recall portraits, fruit or landscapes his deep connection with a vision of autonomous beauty tinged by malevolence seems evident. His unusual painter’s touch and the glow that emanates from his work induce not only specific images but also an entire atmospheric world. When we get immersed in that world’s voluptuous conditions it takes on an unearthly yet mesmerizing aspect. Whatever sense of alien majesty we see and sense in his work is matched by an undertone of dark uncanniness. It is this added component of unease and disquiet that fascinates me for Gade’s vision is not merely fascinatingly idiosyncratic or eccentric. His work is sustained by an inherent mood of mysteriousness and double-readings. In evoking both paradisial conditions as well as a suffocation of the spirit the artist’s synthetic effort carries with it an emotional maturity and depth that is belied by the artist’s playful use of brilliant parrot-like colors: blues, reds, greens. For example, Blue Mountain’s pneumatic aspect suggests a mountain landscape - an evocation of a softly muffled children’s world on the verge of withdrawing completely within its own interiority, while a human presence, unnervingly, seems to hover within it. Cyclops, by contrast, has a looming fantastical presence that is abetted by its strong frontality. There is a figural aspect to this work in which we discern hints of a body turning away, vestigial outlines indicating head and shoulders. This entity seems to be turning away from the viewer’s gaze creating an aspect of foreboding, even dread. The artist’s sensibility is such that he infuses all of his work with a palpable atmosphere of fullness and lushness so as to invoke an ideal state. This imagined condition of balance, happiness, ecstasy and voluptuousness, however, evokes the artificial and the paradoxical. His paintings’ bright coloration and their volumetric amplitudes, as well as their initial innocent or child-like readings also suggest totemic beings or eroticized forms imbued with an authority that is hardly to be questioned. Part of the fascination with this work is that the artist, allows sub-currents of often-contradictory sensations to permeate his work. He isn’t trying to create a person or a thing, or a creature in any recognizable sense. Instead Gade is suggesting to the viewer’s mind and eye to connect with mixed sensations of lush growth, arousal, even horror, and the possible conditions that might reinforce such impressions. The work of Reinhard Gade is alive with feeling and sensuality and the character and quality of this vitality is unique. The artist’s nuanced way of working line and contour and color produces endless perceptual surprises. Often we recognize the living presence of dual or triple identities peeking out through the shapes he offers us in his work: human-like, but animal-like and plant–like as well. In his paintings instinctive forces are presences which create and direct a world where, enigmatically, time and death seem to have no place yet are always roaming, somehow, for viability. This apparitional aspect pervades the artist’s works and makes them endlessly compelling. While irrevocably melancholic at its core, Reinhard Gade’s sensuous otherworldly universe sustains us, ultimately, with its complex beauty. Dominique Nahas Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic based in Manhattan. He teaches critical theory at Pratt Institute and is a critique faculty member of the New York Studio Program. He is the 2007-8 critic-in-residence at the Hoffberger Graduate School at the Maryland Institute College of Art.