An exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake from January 19 through February 23, 2019 in Berlin, Germany, brought together two artists working in different media: Paintings by Lucas Reiner and sculptures by Johannes Esper. Informed by a profound engagement with their specific material, both artists rely on a subdued palette to create raw yet delicately structured works that are striking in the poetic subtlety.
Lucas Reiner’s recent series of paintings includes large-scale monochrome canvasses as well as smaller works portraying solitary trees abstracted from their original urban settings. Each work’s surface generously conveys its singular history through material traces that disclose repeated modifications and erasures, layered colors and altered forms, visibly articulating creative decisions revelatory of the artist’s conceptual process.
Collectively titled “Himmelsleiter” (which in German affords no differentiation between sky and heaven), this series refers to the iconography of Jacob’s Ladder connecting heaven and earth, inviting migration between realms both real and transcendent. Inspired by Reiner’s fascination with Berlin’s seasonally gray sky, his commanding monochrome paintings initally appear to be opaque; however upon closer engagement the subtle modulations of hue and texture found in these works convey an immersive impression of unfathomable depth. His rich, intimate tempera paintings are based on pollard trees that Reiner encountered in Chernivtsi, the hometown of his grandfather in western Ukraine, which for him uncannily evoked the radically trimmed trees characteristic of Los Angeles, a subject of the artist’s previous comprehensive body of work.
In these new works the crucial perceptual relation of figuration foregrounded against monochromatic backgrounds reflects an impulse to equalize the introspective and the observational, the subjective and objective. Beyond their aesthetic virtues, Reiner’s paintings evoke an open, contemplative space that invites us to embrace an expanded empathic vision of the world.