Jeroen Cremers: The Unexpected Guest : Verena Kerfin Gallery, Köthener Strasse 28, 10963 Berlin


Past exhibition
February 09 - March 15, 2024
Overview
Fun should not be missing in the studio!

Nothing gives young children more pleasure that secretly living out their fantasies of destruction. Dolls whose heads are torn off, hours of crashing plastic cars in space-time loops with accidents and supposedly the worst possible injuries for the plastic drivers, sticks that turn into rifles and mow down everything in the vicinity. And then there are the horrified and shuddering adults. Children are helpless and, through their imagination, have no influence on reality.Adults cannot imagine a reality devoid of ideas, ideologies, and wishful fantasies. For them, anger becomes not just a feeling but a tangible reality.

Now, the child is not only hidden in the man, but also in the artist, who has been trained to suppress the causality between fantasy and reality. They are supposed to be free to play; to idealise the beautiful, conjure up the unattainable and welcome the cruel.

A glance at the films offered on Netflix makes it clear: nothing entertains and triggers more fantasies than violence: revenge, greed, murder. Revenge and murder, greed and murder, money and murder, poverty and murder—rewarded or punished, that’s what moves us. No matter how much yoga we do to calm down, to centre ourselves, to switch off- we just end up switching on murder and vigilante justice again!

An artist who is free to unleash his creativity, what should he choose? The Mona Lisa, Jesus, a sunset? Or the Inferno—hell? The audience knows what captivates them, as shown by Netflix, so the choice should be easy for us and the artist in the face of banal daily sunsets and the rather mundane crucifixion of Jesus in contrast to the spectacular modern wars and the Mona Lisa, which can’t really keep up with Kim Kardashian and probably doesn’t generate half as much revenue. Well, we know what excites us: The Inferno! The beautiful Inferno! Or rather, playing with the beautiful and infernal!

Mountains of zombies flooding over the wall like a tsunami, gigantic masses of drooling bodies, bodily remains—so exaggerated by Hollywood that it's fun to watch. No longer being able to identify the masses, only ears, noses, something here and there. A living mountain of ears screaming for destruction! The stomach already hurts from laughter! Where are the crisps... With a keen instinct and talent gifted by nature, the artist glued ears and noses moulded from plasticine to the wall of a gallery. With their innate talent, they allowed us a serious look at the grand grotesque through the subtle, precise arrangement of fragments! Earnest is an earnest companion!

The Sphinx in Egypt has been excavated several times and yet covered by sand again and again. Kings, historians, everyone tries to appropriate it for their grand dreams, to tame it—a colossus of stone. Archaeologists argue about its meaning or ignore each other. The one with the wildest theory tries to topple the one with the most established theory from the throne of fame and glory. And the Sphinx remains just a stone. There's no Sigmund Freud in sight, treating Moses and freeing Michelangelo from incomprehensible muttering. Only archaeologists who see- want to see- millennia-old water marks from flooding on the Sphinx and are sure that she not only had a lion's body, but also originally a lion's head!

For Heinz von Foerster and the constructivists, there are no objective truths, only subjectively invented realities. The construction of reality arises in the observer. The one who knows takes precedence over what is to be known. What a playground! What a possibility! Well, most don't take this possibility seriously and take themselves and their "objective theories" too seriously. Fortunately, we are surrounded by artists, constructivists, nihilists, fatalists, infernalists, players… who create for us a new entertaining world without seriousness, where we crash if we take them and the other theorists seriously in their mad gestures of "objectivity," and where we can approach everything with a cheerful laugh, like the 70-year-old Heinz von Förster, while looking at the world. Just as we do, while looking at arithmetically cubist mutated Sphinx heads, undoubtedly pointing to an artificial superintelligence as the beginning of everything, or the dancing and balancing crocodiles, hippos, etc., in a black universe, in an empty control centre, where all that is missing is an old embroidered cloth on the wall that should read: "God is dead, greetings Friedrich!" And Ming vases float in three-quarter time alongside Coca-Cola bottles through space. A comedy, undoubtedly a grotesque comedy. Has anyone seen Earnest? Earnest? Hello?
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