Concept Stories
by Rolf Lauter, Frankfurt am Main 1994
Frank Dömer’s painting thematizes painting through the formal gesture of abstraction and motif variation, the series or group. The subject matter he deals with is the object of experiential reality, the search for images of the private, the intimate and memory. In the work Public Enemy (1992/93), for example, there are almost 100 small-format pictures in which he makes painterly reflections based on the theme of the >chair<. The everyday object is treated as a variable functional object, as part of a spatial context or as a perceptual aesthetic factor. No object – and it may often seem so – is the same as another. Dömer’s painterly problem is the problem of the individual and the mass, of the subjectivity of perception versus the objectivity of the idea. Painting gives the artist the possibility of reproducing an object in its spatial and temporal appearance. Painting is perceived as abstract, but at the same time as a real entity. It is therefore only logical that Dömer takes his inspiration from models from art history. He quotes motifs, painting styles or content and turns painting into a self-referential medium. A series of female nudes from 1993 shows a condensation of the artist’s perception into >moments<, snapshots of the ideas of a person, a body, that are fixed in memory. Individual body parts are stylized in their erotic presence as >objects of desire<. Occasional pictorial texts emphasize the depictions into narratives, without the viewer ever being able to fully resolve a story. Painting as a biographical notebook. The female nude is usually embedded in an anonymous coloured space, in an open space of thought. In the series Anne I-V (1993), a woman painted in shades of grey is embedded in a beach landscape soaked in bluish red. Memory changes an image, an idea of a person. In the small series of four grey-on-grey paintings Untitled (1992), which show a woman on the beach, the artist gradually brings the figure closer to the viewer with each new painting, starting with a distant view. With increasing proximity, the view of the body and finally of the woman’s naked breasts intensifies. A still life merges imperceptibly into a nude. In his most recent work, a group of 20 paintings of the same size, all consisting of a green-coloured fabric printed with patterns, on which the artist has painted small children sitting, lying, playing or laughing in a rectangular field with lighter shades of blue and grey, a stronger pictorial consistency becomes clear once again. The small child, a favourite object of observation in everyday family life, here becomes the subject of a self-observing painting. Variations in motif and form serve to play through a theme in different directions in terms of content and form. Paraphrases of art history mingle with images of the present. Space and time seem to be suspended. The light blue colour tones >distort< the depictions of reality. Only the pieces of fabric that have been left as frames establish a connection to the present. The designs themselves seem to emerge from the subconscious, from memory, beginning to move in our thoughts like distant images of our own childhood. With this group of works, Frank Dömer releases parts of our memory, allowing us to feel a small part of our collective past.
