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MAIK WOLF
By Martin Engler The World as Dream and Composite
Paintings from a foreign star, something hostile to life and exceedingly cold comprises the grounds of Maik Wolf’s pictorial worlds. Oddly erroneous colours illuminate glowing vedute that reveal surreal buildings among unpeopled landscapes. The terrain is inhospitable; the architecture is aggressive. The paintings appear still to linger within a nocturnal shadow, even after having—like Monolith 2 from Cluster 10—been graced by the ancillary presence of the Tag [Day]. On the horizon, a range of mountains gleams in pinkish-violet purple tones. The expansive plane before them is dominated by an enthroned and tremendous architectural massif, which juts from the dizzying heights of its foundational platform through the depth of the pictorial space. Like a toy that has been cast aside by a cyclops, the building stacks itself upward, creating a monumental impression, without revealing whether the beholder is confronted with real, extensive space-consuming architecture or faced with a mere model. Prominent horizontal slices of buildings measure the pictorial space between the horizon and the picture plane, appearing to make contact with the latter’s left edge—thereby bursting the boundaries of the format. What seems—in contrast to the brutality of the cluster-architecture—to be an almost handcrafted stairway pushes the building even higher toward the heavens and grounds it in the depths of the ground plane. Here at the picture’s edge, at the unseen foot of the stairway, a couple of trees (the sole vegetation represented in the painting) push their way into the field of view. The building above the abyss thus wins still more height, appearing to be located—and with it, the beholder—among a life-threateningly high, alpine area that lies above the timberline. These pictures and the worlds which are beamed from them are somnambulist inventions, fragmentarily fomented dreamscapes, which, at first, remain reluctant at revealing their true significance: a world as composite and conception, as an amalgam of various disparate spaces and realities. Indeed, they are comprised of grandiose stage sets and projection spaces, panoramic backdrops and impressively painted facades—all bound to the task of yet finding their story. At the same time, they are often eversions of fantastical dream worlds, as is true of Mausoleum 4 from Inner Space. A Böcklin-reminiscent Isle of the Dead rises up from the labyrinthine necropolis; water no longer separates the dead from the living but now the gaping cement abysms of open burial chambers enshrouded in nighttide tenebrosity. The island itself has mutated into an architectonic hermaphrodite crowned with bonbon-coloured cypresses, enshrouded by the expanse of an altogether unearthly firmament. One is confronted once again with this coldness, this feeling of being engulfed by another world, or another planet—as though immersed in time-travel pictures of dream-world interiors, where the laws of the world, along with tectonic and spatial integrity are superseded entirely. Both the painter and the beholder are transformed into astronauts, travelling to faraway worlds, which are only—or rather expressly—dreams, in fact residing close to home. Foreign elements are paired with nigh and trusted ones—science-fiction worlds with romantic death-cults, alpine mountain-panoramas with interstellar iciness. And then unexpectedly—especially in the Schattenwanderung [Shadow-Wanderings] paintings—this world is dismantled back into its disparate pieces of scenery; the dream comes apart at the seams, and the painterly invention coagulates and congeals. What then become visible are the abstract spaces behind the dreams—abstract layering and sculptural abbreviation, between which landscapes burgeon. Colour and body now insist upon their autonomy anew, revealing painting that has discontinued any telling of stories. The previously navigable, once safely-entered spaces have become fields of absolute ambiguity. Topographic and content-related assuredness is now obtained only on a local and provisional level: landscapes unfolding into spatially dominant metaphors that still search for their significance within the picture.
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