reviews Andre butzer
Andre Butzer
ALison JACques GALLery, London
13 JuLy – 11 AuGust
Untitled (mit N-Haus), 2007,
oil on canvas, 135 x 230 cm.
Courtesy the artist and
Alison Jacques Gallery, London
There’s a childlike innocence to the paintings of German painter André the two, Butzer evokes the innocence of the cartoon world and the space
Butzer. This is not simply because they feature the kinds of crude and programme’s search for new frontiers. And certainly there is a sense in
clumsy figuration typical of a child; nor is it due to their outsize proportions. which Butzer is pushing at the bounds of painting, as – in purely spatial
Rather it’s in the maniacal gazes of his characters that a state of innocence terms – his canvases seem too small to contain his bloated subjects.
can be gauged. Butzer’s paintings are populated by two sets of ‘peoples’, Still, juxtaposed with the innocence entailed in formal infantilisation is
both in evidence in Butzer’s solo show at Alison Jacques Gallery in London: the spectre of experience. The ghostly outline of a death’s head, for example,
the ‘Friedens-Siemens’ (whose enormous bug-eyes contain alert pupils) can be duly glimpsed rising out of coagulated paint in the apparently
and the ‘Schande-Mensch, characterised by blank stares, and modelled on abstract Untitled (2007). The Schande-Mensch, one suspects, have seen
a combination of SS death’s heads and the gaping monad from Edvard it all before; their dark sockets, some of which are gridded to suggest their
Munch’s The Scream (1893). eyes have been scratched out, hint at self-imposed blindness.
Butzer initiates a play of gazes between his characters and the Butzer’s canvases present chaotic landscapes littered with symbols,
viewer, where the enormous eyes of the Friedens-Siemens invite the viewer navigated by innocents and the wilfully blind. The potential for excitement
to follow the direction of their gaze, while the dark sockets of the Schande- offered in this scenario is equalled by the artist’s excitement for the
Mensch constitute a black hole in which the viewers might lose themselves. potential of the medium. The difficulty for the viewer, however, is the moral
Untitled (F.S.-Kinder) (2007), displayed in an annex of the gallery’s main ambiguity entailed in the see-no-evil approach these figures take and in
space, features five beaming smarties staggered across a canvas. Each the fact that innocence itself can be morally ambiguous. In a landscape
looks in a different direction and not quite at each other, while the objects strewn with hints of swastikas and half-recognisable symbols, the potential
of their gazes are nowhere to be seen; we follow their eyes to realise that for danger is as worrying as it is exciting, turning on the decisive moment in
the point lies not in any object but the act of looking itself. In the context which we accept or disbelieve Butzer’s neophyte expressionism.
of their medium, these characters take on symbolic meaning and ask, with Laura Allsop
their huge eyes, that the viewer regard painting (that tired but recently
‘revived’ medium) in a similarly open and unself-conscious way.
Butzer describes his practice as ‘science-fiction expressionism’,
one in which his characters search for Nasaheim (an amalgam of NASA
and Anaheim, the original site of Disneyland in California). By conflating
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