2666

10.06.2023 – 08.07.2023

In an almost exhaustive manner, Jean-Damien Charmoille deals in his paintings with the spirit of the times and the effect that people have on their surroundings and the surroundings on people. Danger lurks behind the ordinary.

Exhaustion is the greatest plague of our time. Painting has come back through Instagram, wrote Text zur Kunst editor Isabelle Graw a few years ago, and realistic painting is celebrating an unimagined comeback since Vaporwave has the makings of an aesthetic mainstream – everything goes in painting at the moment and a postmodern realism could prevail as a kind of Instagram realism.

The title of the exhibition “Exhausted on 21st Boulevard” seems like a mental image in the Benjaminian sense – which road are we following at the beginning of the 21st century and why are we all so exhausted already, although it has only just begun?

2666 – the last posthum published novel by Chilean writer Roberto Bolano, a massive work – just like “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace, the other novel Charmoille refers to in interviews – became famous as a “postmodern epic”.”2666″ is about an unsolved series of murders of women in Mexico and is considered a breathtaking journey into the dark heart of the modern world.

2667/Campania dei Veleni – outstanding for me – shows a mountain of rubbish and makes one think of Fassbinder, “Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod”, because the painter also quotes the rubbish dump in Naples that gave this work its title.

But it is the colors and the composition that are in the foreground here – an interesting coloring, a mixture of pastel and clear colors, as if the slider had been turned up in Photoshop – what might have been called Techno Color in the (film) past, so a certain exaggeration is at work here (Norbert Bisky, Neo Rauch. Leipzig School, no wonder, JD Charmoille lived in Leipzig for 5 years) in the coloring, which gives the whole thing this American, hyper realistic touch – also a touch of pop, but pop of the 21st century, no longer of the 20th century, a pop that does not shy away from the authentic like the devil shies away from holy water, on the contrary. “If I had to summarise what I think painting does, I would say that it seizes – the real, things, beings. This is the fundamental question that arises in the studio when I look at the canvas in progress: have I managed to catch the subject?” (Jean-Damien Charmoille) Charmoille’s work presents itself as a quest – a painter searching for his subject, for contemporaneity and hipsterism, and for what holds it all together. Realism in post-internet times is so much more than an aesthetic style.

Nadja Geer