JENS KAEUMLE

Should you not know Dante, hell is cold. Ice cold. I begin here because if you were to synthesize Jens Kaeumle’s most recent exhibition into a single idea, you’d have “context is everything.” And, for Kaeumle, that circle is life. The endless repetition, the eternal return, the hell of the same we’ve seen and known from Friedrich Nietzsche, or Jean-Paul Sartre, or Jean Baudrillard. That unique, European post-nihilism that results when your continent got ravaged by multiple wars in the 20th century and was the epicenter of an unimaginable evil. So, here he shares a map of his longstanding interrogation of mortality — and every work is a step into the void.

Part of the issue is that Kaeumle has a compulsion to depict the “what was” as if it were the “what is.” He’s constantly demanding the audience take a moment, reflect a moment, pause a moment, long enough to truly consider the stories some share. Adam and Eve.  But for Kaeumle, the true focus of the work is the serpent, in the foreground, instigating demise. Of course, in Kaeumle’s garden the issue is not original sin, but rather free will. Adam and Eve have  the choice; its outcome is past the horizon, while that object of desire, the apple, is shrouded in the midground. All-seeing eyes, signs and symbols that suggest omniscience and omnipotence, are already writ large to deflect the free ideal.

At other times, Kaeumle’s gestures reveal only minimal aspects of identity. A series of portraits repeats voids for eyes, slashes of paint for mouths. He captures the diffusion of the everyday, of the acceleration of time, the shared and constant - yet futile - desire to move beyond history in the precise moments we make it. Then, in a work that looks like a processional, he captures us with a sense of familiarity. It is as if the central figure from Francisco Goya’s The Third of May has returned, only to share the screen with those in the funeral scene from The Godfather Part II.  Kaeumle captures a moment, then suspends us in a space between life and death. And this is crucial.

When Kaeumle pushes pictorial space even further, he does so to depict the conceptual spaces between good and evil, between right and wrong. Whether he is rewriting our understandings of dislocation, concretely and metaphorically, or challenging us to reflect upon our roles within the ongoing vagaries of class, race, or place, he continues to do so in ways which are inferential rather than direct. Here, a pair of young black children stand metaphorically as reminders of colonialism’s history, expansion’s impacts, of the necessity of reflection against the danger of repetition. His subjects are as linked with what Joseph Kosuth calls “the play of the unmentionable” as they are with the realization that this is both document and metaphor.

Then, the challenge. We’re asked to consider whether these are figures in a landscape, or figures of a landscape. Colonizer or colonized. Liberator or perpetrator. Self or other. Part of Kaeumle’s language for this dialogue is material: those many fragments that form and populate his surfaces. Wax. Burlap. Linseed oil. Charcoal. Gold acrylic paint. Ink. Oil paint. Branches. The branch, as a split, as a family tree, as a break, as a commodity, reinforced by the very ideas of gold and oil, here captured in paint. The architecture he depicts metaphors for these very works, which he refers to as sculpted tablets. Here, Kaeumle throws them down from his mountain, destroying our preconceptions of being, of identity, of self, and of meaning. Step close to his works, let the shapes dissolve, and immerse between the impermanence of being and the immutability of the creative. Man once I was, indeed.