189 - NEO RAUCH

NEO RAUCH (born 1960 in Leipzig, based there) From the series (Tournier) “Friday or in the Lap of the Pacific,” Sheet 1, 1987 Gouache on paper. 75 x 100 cm. Framed under glass. Signed and dated (19)87 in lead at the lower right. Titled and inscribed on the reverse. Rarely does Rauch reveal a key to his paintings as openly as he does here: Michel Tournier’s 1967 novel *Friday, or In the Womb of the Pacific* tells the story of Robinson Crusoe in reverse—it is not the European who civilizes the stranger, but the stranger who upends Robinson’s established order. Rauch takes up this reversal of roles in his series of paintings, and this reversal is already reflected in the composition itself: The human figure does not assert itself as a clearly contoured, self-determined subject against its surroundings, but rather dissolves into them through color—an echo of the literary source, in which it is not the human who dominates the environment, but who is absorbed and transformed by it. Against a mint-green background, a white, curved form pushes forward: a human figure that—except for the head—completely blends into the color scheme of its surroundings. Rauch deliberately leaves open whether the man is still in the water or has already reached the shore; a moonlight-like glow highlights the outline just enough that the figure seems to be drifting as if in a state of unconsciousness. It is precisely in this chromatic fusion of figure and ground that the compositional artifice lies: it allows Rauch to evoke both movement and stillness simultaneously—one feels as though one can still sense the pull of the waves, while the painting at the same time conveys a sense of “having arrived.”