Bodo Gaston Boehm RKI

NATURALIA ET MIRABILIA

BODO GASTON BOEHM

WANDERING AROUND RALITY AND FANTASY

“A Giacomo”

NATURALIA ET MIRABILIA:

Exhibition 09.11.2012 - 04.01.2013 Robert Koch Institut, Galerie im Übergang Nordufer 20, 13353 Berlin

wandering around reality and fantasy.

BODO GASTON BOEHM

Table of contents

Diego Mantoan Naturalia et Mirabilia

Carolina LioBrief note concerning contemporary landscape.

Paolo Meneghetti The knot of self and its unconscious fermentetion.

Daniela Ambrosio

Federica SantoroVision of changing landscape

Biography

Supported

9-12

15-17

19-23

27

30-32

39

40

I was born into a world of conflicting ideas along with strong images, in an era in which songs instilled hope for the future while newspapers began the countdown to the end of the planet’s resources. Spectators aware of the race towards the inconsiderate progress.

My landscapes are imbued with this knowledge but above all by a seed of the change that is coming and that in recent years has been making headway. I look at nature through innocent eyes and I am still amazed to see among the cracks in the cement a bud, and in a puddle a primordial soup that beats with life. The atmosphere and the climate, are critical com-ponents in the design of my work, I let nature draw its story on my canvas which appears as a plot that unfolds forming another world.There is no other land to farm, or other water to drink, if not ours, there is no other consciousness to be pursued, if not the global one.

Bodo Gaston Böhm

NATURALIA ET MIRABILIA IN THE WORK OF BODO GASTON BOEHM

Enchantment is the impression that 16th and 17th Century Wunderkammern had on their contemporary spectators. These strange collections mixed a various range of objects: some were artefacts, while others had been created by mother nature. One could nd fossils together with Roman coins, mummied animals and ivory sculptures, bizarre creatures and paintings of hairy human beings. Although most of the col-lected objects were in fact articial, even some devilishly winged reptiles, the specta-tor’s amazement depended on their acquaintance with nature. Humankind was still lingering in an Age of superstition, when good and evil forces were thought to shape one’s destiny. Unlike Middle Ages, though, some early researchers around Europe started to question nature’s mysteries and found groundbreaking answers. Science was moving fast forward, and some aristocrats wanted to catch up the pace of expan-ding human knowledge. In fact, the Wunderkammer is a clumsy attempt to nd stable categories in the scope of natural phenomena.Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria’s heterogeneous collection, still on display in its original location at Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck, is a well preserved example of such a gallery, probably the very best that has resisted up to date. It gives a spectacular insight to an Era of change, when human beings were starting to dominate nature, instead of continuing to adapt to its evolution. Nevertheless, the Wunderkammer still reveals a kind of distance and respect towards nature,which slowly disappears in the scientic collections of the 18th and 19th Century, dedicated to a complete and thorough categorisation of naturalia. The Wunderkam-mer-socity could still nd amazement in nature, and maybe even atonement.Being incapable of grabbing nature’s essence somehow prevented mankind from destructing it.

Human knowledge experienced a fast increase, and so did the direct and systematic interventions on nature. Suddenly, humans started to be careless about their habitat and about the consequences of the industrial turn. Although the cause of this attitu-de is much more greed, scientic thought had turned down nature’s air by uncovering every riddle it concealed. An Era of colonisation was about to begin, which aimed at the total control and power over any inferior being.This could mean overcoming of weaker Nations, enslaving of aboriginal tribes, intervention on the environment. Huge masses of people were drawn from the countryside to the outskirt of gloomy and overcrowded towns, losing their contact to nature forever. Romanticism may be seen as a reaction to the positivistic consequen-ces that had turned society around, but in fact it was much more a kind of nostalgic projection of the human self on the outside world. Nature became, then, the mirror of the poets’ mood, the temple of an artist’s feelings. One had to wait for Naturalism toand an upright defence of the ecosystem, even though aimed at the social con-ditions of the working class. Nevertheless, it was the rst and only time in the 19th Century when art reected its growing concern with the fundamental changessociety and nature had gone through in such a short time. Sure the solution put forward by the Luddites movement – that is the systematic destruction of every machine – was a quite unorthodox one, but it succeeded in stirring the awareness about human condition and his environment. Such forms of extremism often help to shift on the long run the way we watch the owing and apparently unchangeable fate humankind is living in.Today’s environmental movements serve the same purpose as the Luddites’: they may never convince the majority of people they are in the right, but they are capa-ble of instilling a new idea into common sense. Their failure is only bound to the growing speed of man’s incredible capacity of destruction: World War II marked the

bench, but the exploitation of the environment has not stopped since. Artistic move-ments in the Sixties, from performances to Land Art, desperatelytried to shake human consciousness one last time before it was to late. The naked actions of Austrian artist and architect Hundertwasser, as well as his buildings pe-netrated by meadows and trees, are probably the best examples of a possible bargain between technical evolution and our surrounding environment. The style of Hun-dertwasser bares again that kind of respect that was due towards nature before the start of the industrial revolution. Unfortunately, to set a good example seems a failing strategy today. Flooded by information, mostly unnecessary and unwanted, people who live in the new-media era react chiey to harsh messages, if ever. In 2010 the square at Gänsemarkt in Hamburg was lled with 322 refrigerators by artist Ralf Sch-merberg, who composed them into an igloo: cold on the outside, warm on the in-side. The title of this piece is very signicant: “Der Stromfresser”, the energy-eater. In front of the entrance a screen was measuring the current waste of electricity, which was huge, of course. Though it’s like showing pictures of lung-cancer to an inveterate smoker: it’s unlikely for him to stop even after seeing the black shadows all over the X-rays. The Venetian painter Bodo Gaston Böhm is apparently on the same wake as this environmental tendency that permeates some part of the art world, at least the one that isn’t concerned with self-referential subjects. In his oil paintings he con-fronts the viewer with the extreme consequences of human intervention on the envi-ronment. One after another, Böhm creates landscapes of pure destruction, in which Mother Earth is shown shattered into pieces. The paintings could seem like visions of distant planets, but they are in fact drawn from actual photographs. Mankind is completely absent from the picture, even though all that remains is the direct eect of our actions on the ecosystem: desertication and laceration of the world’s surface, barren and sterile plates. There is yet another hint at mankind in Böhm’s paintings, in spite of the oblivion of the human gure. One feels the presence of man due to the

choice of representing a landscape with the traditional horizon constructed through para-mathematical perspective. As the great art historian and theoristErwin Panofsky has shown, the mathematical perspective is one of the main intellec-tual achievements of the Modern man. It reveals the very moment in which mankind has placed itself in the centre of existence, putting God and nature out of the way. Renaissance perspective sets us, for the rst time after the Middle Ages, in the epicen-tre of our destiny. Suddenly, individuals became masters of their own life and of all that surrounded them. The choice of painting landscapes with a traditional perspec-tive seems to point at the fact, that salvation (both of mankind and nature) is still up to us, or at last this is what the artist may believe. In a recent work for a group exhibi-tion in Venice held in June 2012, though, Böhm has overlaid his paintings with large paper sheets, in order to extract its texture by frottage. The result was impressive: the landscapes were transformed into pure matter put onto a surface, like particles seen through a microscope. These drawings inspire a whole bunch of contrasting sensa-tions: the feel of smoothness as opposed to roughness, stiness and exibility, balance and mixture.Curiosity arises immediately and one is drawn towards these visions in an urge to study them thoroughly, to understand the mystery they keep inside. A sense of enchantment pervades the viewer, an enchantment one must pay respect to. It is the very feeling aecting many scientists, eager to discover the secrets of nature without hurting her.Bodo Gaston Böhm’s art brings us back to an Era of naturalia and mirabilia, an age when mankind was content with nature’s gifts – day by day – and still capable of sincere enchantment.

Diego Mantoan

“Garden Withered” 50 x 50 cmMixed media relief on canvas with acrylic colors .



“Garden Withered” 62 x 63 cmMixed media relief on wood with acrylic colors .

BRIEF NOTE CONCERNING CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE.

One of the main questions the art critic asks himself is ‘does it still make sense?’ Such well nourished history of art such as the European, and obviously American, has produced such a quantity of material and intellectual thoughts to bring about the need for some form of protection. A esthetic art has suffered because it has been seen as being no longer meaningful, too dissected, exploited, tied too much to an old idea .

Representation, the true focus of aesthetic art, was always put to the test by com-paring it with reality, is slowly diminishing and where it still exists it is distorted to allow the understanding that the subject is only an excuse or what is interesting about it is a conceptual vision that goes beyond reproduction

This is all true, and it comes about with a view to developing a natural and cultural progress that feels the need to get away from the image and the surface in order to analyze something more. And it is precisely this kind of progress that imposes a selection that forces critical debates on: ‘does it still make sense?’ so it is necessary to leave behind every classic anchorage, all the subjects, all forms of representation. Take for example landscapes. The landscapes by David Hockney, Peter Doig, Cecily Brown do they still make sense? We’re talking about top international artists, works that are considered masterpieces, artists who have taken part in the most important contemporary art exhibitions. Their paintings are displayed proudly with convic-tion by the most powerful galleries and institutions. Still, they are landscapes, the kind of subject with which the critic tries to identify the non-professional artists,

those who have lost sight of the rules of contemporary and perhaps do not have the opportunity to get into the official art circuits. Yet these are artists who have arri-ved, that the market can no longer deny or betray, are still dedicated to landscapes, revisited of course according to their personal styles, transformed by their research and their points of view, from the way they manage the space on their canvas and the use of color.Is it just because the landscape is seen as an easy excuse? An easy subject? Icono-graphy so deeply rooted in the history of every artist that it feels in some way the need to seek confrontation? In part, yes. But the landscape in contemporary society, so analyzed, so psychological, is a reference to a land that often has little to do with the landscape itself.

The most important, let’s also say complete, freedom of expression in recent decades has led to a transformation of the landscape into something much more personal, an intimate ground in which to reinterpret and create the world using a vision and style that identify specifically the artist himself. Not having to anchor ourselves anymore the painter of contemporary landscapes can represent a personal nature, be the creator of a world that incorporates and summarizes their research and their views on the management of physical or emo-tional material.

All contemporary research on the landscape, if developed in this sense, becomes a second creation that speaks to us of the inner world rather than the landscape itself.This type of operation is also carried out by Bodo Gaston Boehm who paints lan-dscapes in an abstract and in a certain sense torn way. His territories are flat in transformation, where cracks and craters open and close in search of a stability that never seems to come except in a succession of precarious balance

These landscapes of an altogether desolate or destroyed nature trying to regenerate, have survived a cataclysm or , more likely, human exploitation.

It is a landscape that you could imagine in a science fiction book, a new beginning after a nuclear war , or another planet where life is about to begin. A hostile ter-ritory, without a trace of intelligent life, where we feel a certain active tension, like an effort and a struggle for life in the emergence and prevalence of a dry cracked ground. A new genesis that is configured as a new epic by an artist who is starting from scratch the building of a new nature after having felt the need, in his inner world, to demolish the existing structures to re-examine from the beginning a crea-tion developed with the same work with which every man gives birth to himself and his own individuality.

Carolina Lio

“Teeming” 59 x 71 cm

Mixed media relief on wood with oil colors.

THE KNOT OF SELF AND ITS UNCONSCIOUS FERMENTATION

In his canvas, with acrylic and stucco covering, Bodo Gaston Boehm (Venezia, 1980) shows the figure of a space almost… “planetary”, where time seems suspend in void. Perception of someone who sees the picture will follow a characteristic long shot (in photography), imagining to explore a vast land to the surface. Sometimes, that’s going to up again (as a real subsidence), although, very often, it will happen the opening of a deep “abyss” (almost by a strong deflagration). There, every human settlement is completely absent: a choice which contributes to render the picture a “desert”. The colour rapidly seeps and expands, between long shot reliefs, reprodu-cing ideally the river current, which passes under a canyon. In painter’s intentions, the decision to “canalize” colours leads on itself sensation that figurative shape isn’t to see immediately, but becoming emerged from itself. So, it seems that spectator has to remember this image, as if he revealed it to own intelligence, after having removed it unconsciously (from the birth). Freud thinks that psychoanalytical oblivion is a defensive mechanism, favouring the repression of some “threatening… contents”. So, Boehm shows landscapes undoubtedly disturbing, exactly because he wants to reveal unconscious of every men. Plasticity on his picture (using stucco to get figurative relief) is completely illusory, confusing the “chromatic… waters”, when is difficult to understand its “real” consistency (that in a lake or a little puddle, that in a river or a mere overflow?), Studying the perception more extended, land’s desolation could seem principally troubled, charging canvas with a symbolism almost “ambientalistic”. The same “water” loses its transparency, becoming “thickened” by the key palely whi-te: that of milk, whose “heaviness” of chemical solution, becoming expanded (along the reliefs of “planetary” space), ideally leads its only primitive organism (the amoe-bas, the algae) to putrefy. We have interest to add that Boehm has called some canvas

using name of faded garden, remembering that contemporary man doesn’t care a lot the “wild” land, beyond the mere private property. All the world areas clearly desola-ted or still uninhabitable (deserts, mountain woods, tropical forests, glaciers) today risk to “wither”. According to Jacques Lacan psychoanalyst, the Thing identifies the void that every object leaves behind itself, thinking it in a way just intellectual. When men want to define one being (both of material type, and spiritual), through con-ceptual signification, that rests “lost”, and disappears. According to Lacan psychoa-nalyst, real art work makes that for the first time to perceive visually human subject, contacted it, is the object (pictorial, sculptural, in installation etc…), no more vice versa (as, for example, it happens for intellectual reflection). The “look” of Aesthetics Thing to us causes our disturbing. It causes the object emersion, by itself. Almost, it seems that its real existence rests… “too many”, respect our conceptual power. The “naked life” of Aesthetics Thing is worrying, because it “stains… every intellectual vision”. The polymaterial canvas of Boehm lead figure to “emerge by itself ”, show-ing a “land”, of which organic component seems continually “withered”. Mysterious “water” contributes immediately to stain it, while its tone palely white “strips” it, dragging after itself the “naked skin”. We know that milk expresses the “secretion of vitality”. A putrefaction that however, in the same time, helps to transmit the species (when newborn sucks the mother’s breast). Boehm has explained that his mixed me-dia of painting causes the perception of a reality hopelessly in transformation. So, is it possible to say that even “planetary” landscape, apparently already lifeless, however will go to relive? Maybe, that risks to happen in a way only dramatic: for example, with nuclear explosion… Again, spectator has to grasp the apprehension vaguely “ambientalistic”, inside the Boehm’s poetics, in which gardens beyond private proper-ty are today “withered”. Philosopher Deleuze says that all matter, even if only micro-scopic, results from itself (internally) subdivided endlessly, in “parts” little by little, as

“44°54’N - 59°30’E”149 x 149 cm

Mixed media relief on canvas with oil and acrylic colors .

much as possible, fine in a hidden way. We have to imagine a series of interminable centralizing vortexes, able to accumulate on itself their remaining around “univer-se”. In Boehm’s canvas, surface of “planetary” type is frequently disembowelled, but in a way certainly dynamic. The figure of vortex immediately returns “at stake”. The vitalism, in which that image is always coming back, assumes a psychoanalytic drift. On the other hand, the painter has admitted that he wanted to disturb spectators. Someone who try to reveal own unconscious, “turns continually… around himself ”, because in this transfert operation the “self awareness” is going to happen (trying to exist). In the disturbing mind, thoughts born from a “vitalistic centrifuge”! In his psychoanalysis, Lacan distinguishes the three plans of real, symbolic and imaginary. A theory that is based on the first intuition of Freud. The real explains the immanent dimension of Being. In the imaginary, is hidden our unconscious (with its lecherous instincts). The symbolic order should give it a structure, essentially through the sign of language. Lacan thinks to visualize the three plans of psychoanalysis, with figure of Borromeo Knot. There, it happens that three rings are fastened together. The pe-culiarity is, untying one, that other two immediately will unhook. Lacan forms those in a strategic way. The ring of symbolic stays over the other of imaginary, but under the remaining of real. Guiding the structuralism of linguistic code, is the existential presence in the world. Besides, we perceive the libido only inside the signs (which are significant). The ring of imaginary, stays over the other of real: in fact, uncon-scious founds the subjectivity. In Boehm’s paintings, the long shot “of photography” exists inside the figurative immanence. On the horizon, our look always will tend to “earth up”, continually advancing (into the depth). Also we consider the round surface of every planet. In Boehm pictures, the long shot “of photography” favours the “whirling” perception of natural (real) perspective. When the land “is going to become a desert”, on its brown tone (for the aridity) and grey (for the sand), it will happen the instability of dunes or “bulges”, easily modelled by the wind. Symbolical-

ly, here the unconscious of spectator can be structured. The dunes and the “bulges” represent a speech which always “vanishes inside itself ”, downstream of linguistic signs only “cut off ” (in the humus aridity) or “fleeting” (when the sand will be risen, by the wind). The land vortexes should work as in “lecherous instincts” of our unconscious. For one part, it will happen the “black-hole” of conceptual comprehen-sion, for the other part the “fermentation” of desires most repressed. If the land becoming desert could mark (underline) the unconscious, that should emerge only through its “flowing”, in the “waters… as oil spot (with meanders)” of every canyon. In psychoanalytic way, here it happens the real imaginary. Thoughts will follow each other, under all the “covering” of subjective conscience. With the fermentation, it happens that bacterium transforms a substance, while it has to procure energy to live. So, in butter and cheese factories we know the milk holes, preparing the cheese. In Boehm pictures, those remember us the Borromeo Knot of psychoanalysis, from Lacan. The matter draws close to itself, gathering. The natural or real roundness (of planetary perspective) is made marked only “drily” (in the “bulges” and dunes of thought), revealing us all imaginary of our subjectivity (without removing it again).

Aesthetics review written by Paolo Meneghetti

“44°54’N - 59°30’E”70 x 75 cm

Mixed media relief on canvas with acrylic colors .

“Restless dream” 90 x 84,5 cm


By reading we elaborate images. And vice versa, looking at images we often think back to books that we have read. The first time I saw a work of Bodo Gaston Boehm I thought of a book I had read at University, when we were trying new things and always looking for a suggestive title. The book was The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. I chose to read it because I liked the title - and it still fascinates me - because it is thought provoking, and perhaps says it all. It makes you think of a rocky landscape before the first man or perhaps after the last. After their extinction. And then in a dim light, which leaves on things a delicate foam and infinite nuances. I thought of the earth around the volcanoes, still warm after the explosion. Sparse high heavens that extend along mysterious horizons, without any geographical coordinate. No pre-sence, and therefore no absence. I thought of the phrase “April is the cruelest month”, and of a garden without flowers, but equally beautiful.

“Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.”

Daniela Ambrosio

“Death of hippocampus”80 x 100 cm


“Remains”70 x 70 cm

Mixed media on cotton canvas with oil paints.

VISIONS OF CHANGING LANDSCAPES

It is the landscape to be a leader in the works of Bodo Gaston Boehm. Apparently places immersed in an imaginary living space and absolute time. Visions of a bleak land where human presence is banned.Always attracted by veiled horizons typical of Renaissance paintings, wonderfully ali-ve, seem to move freely in the air and the light, and merged into a single whole heaven and earth, by the three-dimensional space created by vanishing lines and perspective, Boehm chooses to refocus attention on the landscape by using it as an archetype of a state of detachment and isolation between man and nature. As if a place dummy and wild could make it as a sublime mirror to the sinister empty of consciousness that separates man from the worry of its natural environment, and a changing landscape raises que-stions to which becomes an obligation to respond. Admitting these fantastic places like representations to us remains to ask, why? Why so bleak imagery? The artist, through the virtuosity of plastic research framed the envi-ronmental issues through a deterministic and subtly provocative lens, that of a tourist of possibility who reflects, observes and reports faithfully what he sees. Sometimes it focuses on what appears critical attracted by the force of events, sometimes indulges in idealtipi-che and ecstatic visions of lonely and barren places or converses with a mental world that slips into the surreal and metaphysical dimension of the dream as in the series of islands, where the hollows and ravines photographing a landscape in which it’s impossible to draw the boundaries.Unlike figurative painting, which celebrates the myth of man-figure, the landscape devoid of actors becomes itself the main attraction. In represented places the man is completely absent but life is not entirely disappeared. Craters of old withered gardens boils whirling, where the redundant material is used to capture the attention around an unstoppable

“Cubo”60 x 65 cm

Mixed media on cotton canvas with oil paints.

movement that both attracts and frightens. As a flow of incandescent lava which is obser-ved very close, a destructive force pervades the scene, the viewer’s sensory perceptions are shaken; matter that in other works quiets to recover the form of a soft shelter or a cradle, here alienates and disturb.For the artist, the landscape is a scene in which men are given the freedom to create their own sets and live their lives. The skyscrapers of the metropolis, the country houses, the folds of a hand or cracks on a wall, for him there’s no difference, everything is a sort of landscaper for connection or reference and that’s targeting more certain environments, isolating them from their immanent horizon we can almost see these folds and crevices, hostile surface but full of life.Nature can be amazing, surprising us for its beauty, but if it is left cureless or worse con-stantly robbed, it won’t being privileged scene for existence anymore. The man who gree-dily, for years has enslaved the nature to its purposes, is in Boehm’s works the great guilty of transformation that is occurring right under his eyes, and his absence from the scene is more than a test, it is an indictment. Water and land have been contaminated with waste from industrial production to make huge areas of the planet unrecognizable. Massive desertification affected large zones, leaving dry acres once arable become immense tractcs of lands burned. The bet of the artist is to awaken man, to open up his eyes on what he pretends not to see every day: the landscapes depicted do not belong to an unknown pla-net, nor are the result of an apocalyptic fantasy, but the realities. No moral intent but hope that looking images of an inhospitable and hostile nature man would think about the landscape as a common good to preserve, to live with in a relationship of mutual exchan-ge, to return to being the main actor of his destiny. Federica Santoro

“Remains” 50 x 50 cm


“Violet restless” 83 x 84 cmMixed media relief on wood with oil colors .

“Garden Withered” 135 x 127 cm


“Faded memory”50 x 44 cmMixed media relief on canvas with acrylic paints.

“Iso” 54 x 60 cm


“Remains”70 x 70 cmMixed media on cotton canvas with oil and acryl paints.

e-mail: [email protected]

Biography

1980 Born in Venice1996-2001 High school, qualifications plastic model. State Institute for Art Venice.2004-2008 University degree of painting Academy of Fine Arts of Venice Since March 2009 lives and works in Venice and Berlin.

Supported by

Frau Dr. L. BodeRobert Koch InstitutDiego Mantoan Paolo MeneghettiCarolina LioDaniela AmbrosioFederica SantoroElena Armellini

F L U I D AA R T – P R O J E C T

Alessandro PettenàMaureen DonnellyStefano Lombardo

Acknowledgements

© BODO GASTON BOEHM

Bodo Gaston Boehm RKI

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