Johannes Rochhausen “5000 Kelvin”, 30. April – 18. Juni 2011, SchlechtriemBrothers Rosa-Luxemboburg-Strasse 27, 10178 Berlin, DE by craniv boyd.

Johannes Rochhausen "5000 Kelvin", 30. April – 18. Juni 2011, SchlechtriemBrothers Rosa-Luxemboburg-Strasse 27, 10178 Berlin, DE by craniv boyd.

 

4 726,8°c pretty hot out would you say not? Truly cold inside the up and running painting exhibition of Johannes Rochhausen, a gifted exacting technician, whom excels in his focused and determined current painted and drawn emptiness of the site of artistic production, the studio. For those seeking to discover yet one more Young German Painter as if any one person could lay obscene claim towards the efforts and dedication of an artist, look no further than talent, evinced and developed by Johannes Rochhausen, in Leipzig that fabled city of Neo Rauch. 

 

Kelvin is a scientific and absolute unit of measure developed by a British Lord, useful in the discipline of thermodynamics. The title of the exhibition is stifling to conceive of, human bodies do not bear that kind of heat well, I draw the comparison due to the work Johannes Rochhausen, made and displayed for his show exclusively in meticulous and sensitive drab colors, as a realist, and present portrayal if ever there was one of the hermetic loneliness, at times self imposed, at times self necessary, in the pursuit of achieving great painting. For the consideration of the exhibition and collecting public that happens to chance on the casual and just happen to be here in former Soviet sector Berlin, storefront local of SchlechtriemBrothers, spelt together with a type identity oddly reminiscent of PriceWaterHouseCoopers, are not celestial bodies but unpopulated interiors.

 

With out people the activity of the creative act of painting becomes the evidence in these still-life static dramas that contribute in their C. Corot pallet and general vibration, the fact that in the depictions of the artists studio, the apparent embrace and celebration of the tools of that trade the Rochhausen is able to give back quietly and effectively, to people who may or may not have visited the Atelier of a currently working painter. In Johannes Rochhausen's work so far as I can tell from my all too brief encounter with it, we have at play not a direct presentation of the painter him or her self, but of that rare and often times besieged sanctuary which the artist seeks to establish and recreate and reaffirm through out their practice, the work space. Rochhausen with his gifts and emotion is able to create a quotidian and confrontational empty space, a deft elegy to not only where art, and his art in particular are made, but to the task of art making in general. The blank and open nature of the paintings that are in dominant hues of grey may strike one as academic and passé, not so, there is a palpable urgency felt in his canvasses, in their insistence of repetition of what happens in the work space when the work has left, gone for an exhibition, or collector or when a series is completed, is an insistence on painting and its continued relevance for current art and its muted celebration. By craniv boyd.