Concept Stories
Public Enemy 1993
By Susanne Lange
Frank Dömer’s largest series of paintings to date, varying solely on the theme of the „chair“, is entitled „Public Enemy“. In the overall context of his work, it also marks a kind of turning point in the search for a possible representationalism as the thematic starting point of his painting. The series of paintings, consisting of 96 works of the same format, was created over the course of just under a year. In it, Frank Dömer explores his examination of figurative painting against the backdrop of its own history in a variety of ways. Quotations from art history, from Caravaggio, van Gogh or Matisse, are therefore deliberately incorporated into the pictures. Sometimes they remain perceptible only as a mood or, formulaically, become part of the background as a grid and ornament. While some chairs are worked out in great detail, others are only sketched schematically with a few brushstrokes. There are simple stools, ornate or almost baroque chairs, metaphysical-looking chairs with their proportions pushing out of the picture, floating, hanging, dancing chairs, some are distorted or blurred, others appear to have been set aside. The background into which the chairs are integrated, or which functions as a mere projection surface for the object, is very freely designed: Ornaments, grids, scratches, grids, surfaces, rooms, landscape.
Foils for settings of various kinds, but also a desire for material. Apart from a few objects added to the chairs, such as a jacket hanging over a backrest or a beer glass, it is the motif of fire that recurs in many of the pictures. Fire and wood, two components whose encounter inevitably leads to flames that consume, destroy and annihilate the object, but which on the other hand also provide warmth, remain strangely isolated here. Even when the painter’s palette placed on a chair is in flames, the fire never becomes a tangible sign of threat. Like the other objects, Frank Dömer always places it additively; a clear assignment of meaning remains open.
The fact that most of the chairs only have three legs is hardly noticeable at first glance. The object is too quickly coded and identified as a chair, even if it is only a fragment. Three legs, says Frank Dömer, also means taking back power and assuming responsibility, recalling the cultural-historical significance of the four-legged chair, which originally stood for the domesticated, subjugated animal. Taking responsibility implies an awareness of history, making the functional chair, i.e., the non-functioning chair, the symbol of the title. Each of the 96 chairs always remains the image of a chair, which loses its individuality and thus its symbolism when it is lined up in a row, when it is potentiated, and ultimately also becomes a symbol of its own objectivity.
