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Sonja Traar
ABOUT WONDER CHAMBERS, WONDER ANIMALS AND BLACK AND WHITE MEN
Mischievous, absolute in his presence and physical presence, friendly and with slightly playful gestures, this is how Michael Vonbank appears when we meet him. Closeness and distance, directness and opaque impermeability stand side by side. As easy as some words are to find, such as those about his student days or the beginning of his artistic activity, it is difficult to find them when trying to create a verbal tapestry for Vonbank's art. However, to the extent that the words falter, the emotional content increases. It continues to increase the longer the paintings are intensively viewed and finally cumulates in a heated energetic exchange between the viewer and the paintings. Opposing sensations of attraction and repulsion emerge. Michael Vonbank's paintings hit the non-verbal corner of consciousness that knows what it sees, develops an immediate feeling for it, knows how to decide aptly about coherence and incongruity, but is surrounded by a wall against words - perhaps because it is an art that cannot be dissected in terms of art history, that demands words and thoughts that have not yet been found - that are perhaps far too simple, far too strong to be mouthed.
Encounter in words
Michael Vonbank's paintings show wondrous figures, some of whose contours dissolve into the background. They are imaginary creatures with certain traits that make their condition visible. Stencil-like animals and people, framed by thick black lines, enter into a relationship with each other. The basic mood in the large-format canvas works seems to be good: The colouring is fresh and strong. The sometimes whimsical, fairytale-like inventions of a wide variety of creatures create a sense of delight and enchantment. The eye remains captivated by the depiction for a long time. The figures seem to be taken from wildly fantastic animated films of the 1960s, in which all kinds of forms come to life, real beings mutate into oversized children's toys.
The characters, despite everything, teeter on a background of threat and existential fear. There is little of it - just enough to evoke a sense of unknown depths. The miracle machine, which designs the people and animals with mask-like faces and heavily circled eyes, follows a bubbling automatism. This one creates images on the canvas with great spontaneity, out of an inner urge. He doesn't care about colour addiction, which he feeds without thinking, he doesn't care about leaving places in the pictures blank - he makes beautiful and unbeautiful things, he goes wild with the creatures he has just created.
A chamber of wonders opens its doors
Michael Vonbank creates an enormous, colourful picture of his inner self. It seeks expression with such vehemence that this would be disturbed by any tactics, deliberation, weighing or even the compulsion to create something unprecedented. The many, striking eyes in the paintings speak of fear. Nevertheless, the artist takes everything that is created in the pictures upon himself. Although he hurls his inner world away from himself, it is and remains his; he has long since settled all the questions in it with himself. The viewer can become a "co-observer", just catching a glimpse. And yet, the world of imaginative animal creatures and human figures is an open one - with friendliness and mischievousness, it allows each viewer to go his own way in it. He will be satisfied, whether he has walked the path just a little way or whether he has put his skin and hair into the depiction. Whether he has allowed his own imagination to play, his rapture and confusion to take hold, or not. Only when questions are answered with "no", such as the question of surrealist, expressionist or neo-primitivist models, of direct kinship to Comix Art or the "Neue Wilde" as well as of a pure art-brut painting, do the countless possibilities of what Vonbank's art is and can be open up. He is a great painter in the truest sense, a man thoroughly permeated by painting, who finds everything in it, his love, his hatred, his humility, his desire, his satisfaction, who on top of that has built up a self-understanding for the representation of his inner world that receives and holds every form of justification.
Of miraculous animals and black and white men
Of particular quality is the series "Men in black", in which Vonbank dispenses with the use of colour. The black and white pictures nevertheless seem to burst with colour and the impression is created that the colours are depicted in their corresponding grey tones. The diversity of the greys is remarkable, as is the immediacy and inner explosiveness of the paintings. For some time now, the artist has been cutting out some of his magnificent fantasy creatures from aluminium and painting them with acrylic. The result is a wild chicken bursting with colour, a laughing screaming little devil, a six-coloured cat with udders, etc.... These can hang freely in the room or be leaned against the wall. They convey the idea of a lucky charm, a sacred animal or a goblin that does whatever it pleases. There is a strong desire to make such an animal one's own and thus acquire a constituent element from Vonbank's range.
Room installation "Sweet Dreams"
The room installation "Sweet Dreams", which the artist created in 2005, is important to mention. He painted a room completely with graffiti, showing such haunting word creations as "KOMM HER", "ICH WILL NUR DICH (und mich)" or "VERGISS DICH". Sketchy designs of fantasy creatures, animal and human figures can be seen, with oversized genitals, which together with the slogans represent dream content. On the floor, two couples from two different cultures - Christian and Muslim - are sleeping, embodied as life-size dolls. The exclusion only happens as long as it is daytime, when prefabricated reactions and the same old war of words take place. As soon as it is night, the dreams and fantasies are the same. With touching directness, Vonbank breaks a taboo, elevates visual and verbal set pieces from subculture to high culture. His inner level of feeling and the way he links reclining figures and mural painting paint a picture that, thanks to his creative power, is given high artistic expression.
This text was published in the catalog "Michael Vonbank. Counterworlds - A Meeting. Works 2002 - 2008". Edited by Michael Vonbank with texts by Lucas Gehrmann, Peter Gorsen, Sonja Traar and Michael Vonbank.
BUCHER publishing house, Hohenems 2008, ISBN: 978-3-902512-43-4 |