The Coolest Name in Art: Neo Rauch

The best escape from Germany's political turmoil is a world in which the political has dissipated altogether

Unemployment's up again. Over 4 million Germans don't have jobs. Those that do work face the prospect of higher taxes for fewer benefits. The parliamentary "debate" last week on the budget degenerated into a bout of name-calling, so Germans won't be expecting much in the way of reform any time soon. All in all, it was a good week for seeking distraction, and this weekend, the Galerie Eigen + Art provided the best distraction available in Berlin: an exhibition of new paintings by Neo Rauch.

You can't help but wonder how an artist so lacking, so evidently disinterested in sensationalism has managed to stir up so much excitement in the art world so taken with cows sawed in half or pink transcriptions of porn flicks. And yet last year alone, Rauch had four major solo exhibitions, including two in Germany at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. He's been written up in the New Yorker, Frieze and Artforum and his paintings, for which there's a considerable waiting list of buyers, fetch anywhere between $20K and $100K.

And just look at him. Central Casting's very idea of The Artist, as no-nonsense yet also just as romantic as his dedication to paint. Wherever you see him, you expect to find a caption underneath reading, "Neo Rauch, as portrayed by Ed Harris."

His parents were killed in a train wreck when he was a mere six weeks old, so keep a lookout for those heavy locomotives barreling across the canvas, not to mention an ambivalent stance toward technology in general. And then, of course, he was born and raised, studied and graduated in Leipzig, and even though it's been well over a decade since the Berlin Wall fell, there's still a tinge of mystique, at least outside of Germany, clinging to anyone who's done time behind it.

As for the paintings, well, they won't be clashing with anyone's sofa. Rauch never reaches for a yellow when he can use an ocher; his reds are burnt and his blues are so chalky they border on gray. If the color scheme seems familiar, think Jimmy Corrigan. Not because Rauch has necessarily seen a single frame drawn by Chris Ware, but because both Rauch and Ware draw on an overlapping set of resonant souvenirs stored in our collective memory of the mid-20th century.

It isn't just Rauch's palette that recalls the magazine ads of the immediate postwar period and the book illustrations of the cheaply mass-produced volumes of Soviet-era eastern Europe, but the form and composition as well. Besides the clear echoes of Soviet Realism, Rauch's catalog of stock imagery includes the long-gone machinery of a waning industrial age. Trucks, helicopters and so on feature the rounded metallic curves Americans would recognize in cars when they were still called "automobiles."

His figures are nearly always hard at work, but it's difficult to make out what it is exactly they're doing or why. Marx comes to us via Rauch filtered several times over, but without any hint of a self-conscious snicker. This is a world whose edges peter out at some point well before the late 60s, and for all the nods to comics (the speech balloons with just one word in them, or none at all; the folding arrows hanging in mid-air, inviting the viewer to flip the canvas as if it were a page in an on-going story), there is no laughter here, ironic or otherwise.

At times, Rauch depicts himself dreaming all the goings on, so you've got your Freud here, too. Humans appear on the same plane in radically different sizes, all sorts of materials defy gravity, and that's just for starters. Then the reappearance of certain figures and situations go on to suggest that there is a system at the bottom of all this and, given enough clues, you or I could decode it.

No dice. The key factor separating any ideology prevalent in the world Rauch refers to from the world Rauch conjures is precisely that sort of confidence. All the hard work going on in Rauch's paintings, the filling of tanks, the tilling of the soil with neon rods seems to be neither for any sort of social good nor individual profit. It just is; comes from nowhere, leads nowhere. Rauch has steadfastly refused to openly speculate on what he's up to. He probably has very little idea himself; he's probably perfectly fine with that.

The paintings may be disturbing, but they're disturbing in the most comfortable way imaginable. For a long time now, we've known how to cozy up to the alienation blowing through these spaces. In an age done with ideologies, Rauch picks up the remains of the aesthetics they left behind to remind us of a truth more comforting than it might look at first glance: Those ideologies won't hold water now, it's true. But they didn't back then, either.

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