Jürgen Möbius - Archaic News

This new show invites us to discover how Jürgen Mobius' work has developed since his first exhibition at the Adam Gallery in London (Spring 2006). Möbius has progressed vigorously in the inner landscape of his art. Last year's exhibition was strongly shaped by the salient “Ikonographie” series with its barren, yet sublime spaces that were populated by few archaic modules of form. These works are now more and more being replaced by compositions which have a greater sense of movement, and at the same time are built upon smaller elements. Whilst these new paintings remain strongly bound to a strong archaic theme, they present themselves in a more pictorial form and take Möbius' art further towards the abstract bank of the great stream of painting.

Möbius' new paintings clearly show these changes. For example, ‘Mediterranean' is based on the characteristic ‘form-modules' of the “Ikonographie” series. Characteristic of this is a flat basic layer on which spatial formulas, such as the boat, interchange with flat templates. In earlier works the boat marked the transition from purely flat parts of the picture to another spatial dimension. These paintings were inner platforms (stages) for pictorial rites of passage. In ‘Mediterranean', however, Möbius appears to introduce the early vocabulary in a different way: as if they had broken loose from their anchorage, the individual motifs now float around freely on the light surface of the painting. Everything swims, not just the boat ... and thereby finds its place in the composition. A cheerful sun radiates light from the centre to this landscape of elementary, timeless recognition.

As the current exhibition shows, the more fixed and stylized nature of the earlier work has begun to dissolve. At the same time the idea of landscape itself now sometimes tends to disappear. In many works you can still find the objects that populated the original landscapes, however they appear to have separated themselves from their connection with a base. These archaic relics which lay in the picture-landscapes have now turned into fleeting calligraphic-like characters or emblems, which no longer lie mainly on the sand-coloured or green coloured picture surface itself. ‘Moonlight Serenade' shows this in a particularly impressive way, as its vocabulary quotes the above-mentioned ‘Mediterranean' - however the spatial dimension has strongly receded. The elements of the picture emerge, almost as if they have been sprayed on to the picture surface through templates. The archaic here turn into a form of graffiti, into a visual script, which appears at lightning speed and which implies or hints at something, without expressing it. Möbius' paintings have become mysterious aquariums full of riddles, in which forms appear to be moving and changing within the compositions. Like unmoored boats they roll over the surface, moving script, multiple secrets.

In these new paintings, the perpendicular, calligraphic arrangement of the motifs are increasingly brought into the foreground. Lines and shapes in black - ‘Graphisms' - seem glued on like cut out shapes, determining the character of many of the works. These Graphisms enter into a new dialogue with the lower layer of the painting. From the background the pictorially animated base lends the elements on the upper surface a second voice: a subtle rhythm starts up. The musical dimension is also evident in titles like ‘Great Fugue', a major work of the artist. Here the Graphisms are surrounded by colourful borders, which once again introduce calm, without interrupting the energetic vibrations of the composition. The archaic becomes the here and now. It flickers in front of us, it is happening now! And in the globalised world of information we happily question THIS kind of news - the precious, moving news of a very special transmitter: the Channel Painting .

Here the theme returns once again wholeheartedly to abstract painting - whereby the artist doesn't want to commit himself further. This is exemplified in this exhibition by the work ‘Dancer in the Dark', which explicitly refers to a major figurative work of art of the 20th Century. In front of the lower, darker part of the divided background, Möbius has placed the famous silhouette of Pablo Picasso's surreal ‘Acrobat' (1930) from the Paris Picasso Museum. This painting had deeply moved the artist when he saw it in the original in 2005 at an exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation, and he later remarked: ‘I found it strangely sad, which is why I have brought it into the darkness of a gloomy, empty space landscape, where it carries out its autistic, lonely, empty rituals'. Accordingly he changed the dreamy figure of Picasso's white acrobat into a black silhouette.

The acrobat has now become the shadow of a burnt-out Prometheus, who seems to duck under the pictorial energy set free in the grey of the upper part of the painting. Less easy to read because of the blackness, the “acrobat” moves immediately into the proximity of expressive calligraphies and Graphisms as they emerge here in other exhibited works such as ‘The Threat' of the same year. Thus the spider-like curved body is immediately abstracted again and converted into the non-figurative side of Möbius' magnificent art. This floods right through us as a timeless expression of memory and energy, ploughing into our perception and bringing us the happiness of seeing authentic, immovable form. It thereby frees us and the artist himself - at least during the observation of the paintings - from the scepticism which we think is particularly inevitable these days, even if it has always accompanied the affirming power of art.

Painting - one of the finest lessons of this exhibition - is an eternally young original language and always remains constant - whether figurative or abstract. Both banks of its stream are magnificent and generous places. And the painter Jürgen Möbius travels submerged from one bank to the other, exploring and bestowing a language to both.

Philippe Büttner

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen / Basel