Artist: Lukas Quietzsch
Exhibition title: my thoughts are a combination of sex and the (deep) desire to kill myself
Venue: Schiefe Zähne, Berlin, Germany
Date: March 1 – April 10, 2020
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Schiefe Zähne, Berlin
Colossal Youth
“my thoughts are a combination of sex and the (deep) desire to kill myself”
Maybe feminism can crack the nuts of this everlasting dualism of sex and violence. Simultaneously this binarity is still the driving force of thousands of movie-plots as much as part of the constitution of countless adolescences. Interwoven with the feeling of being misunderstood it represents a me-against-the-world logic, that protects some other sentiments from external judgment.
In its fatalistic exaggeration both conditions mark two peaks of a diverse range of emotions whose nuances, in fear of damnation, get crumpled up and trashed into the basket. In confrontation with a late form of capitalism that is extremely hungry for your sentiments, there are a few more reasons not to show them honestly and therefore a couple less opportunities to actually come to terms with them.
Why expose your fucked up inner world to an even more fucked up surrounding? Not yet mentioned: a digital world that would love a reason to see you fall.
The paintings by Lukas Quietzsch uncrease some dismissed feelings and start to work with those in an emphatic, maybe nostalgic way.
Doubtful about the brushstroke’s representational possibilities in terms of a “true” gesture, Quietzsch erases the applied colors by washing them out, applying more, washing them out again.
He drags these motifs through his painting, in which every gestural painterly impulse is taken back by a negation of it, until a patina of gestures and their withdrawal results in the picture.
-Hannes Schmidt
