Krotte
Almost as old as the ingenious and historically indispensable connection between art and drugs seem to be Crazy Frog‘s MTV ringtone offerings (also hard to beat in terms of there design) for mobile phones suitable for the mass market for the first time. Just as secretly smoking a bong in the darkest corner of the park and the refreshing, seemingly never-ending, brilliant visual world of Paul Waak, who longingly merges the universe of canonical painting with the iconography of subcultures. Stylistically skilful, a multitude of relevant pictorial narratives are subtly blended into a mutually intoxicating interplay of aesthetic templates and selected cultural phenomena. This unique pictorial rhetoric opens up a distorted, or if you like, de-distorted view of artistically attractive and personally valuable contexts. Nature fantasies, secret subculture codes, frogs, women, dwarves, cars, cigarettes, toilets, ... appear through the artist‘s well-polished glasses, which are inevitably put on us. Everything that a society and its formative culture has to offer and hide.
And as if that wasn‘t enough, this contemporary and relevant representative of current art, in addition
to style and iconography, also con-quers the entire context of the show and (mis)leads us, as here, to lower gallery levels, to an imaginary grove secluded from the festival to make out with several muses at once. Toad tunnel or art grotto, a slightly worn fairytale ambience with designer sofa in the midst of a serially themed array of paintings, long since arrived at the deep French kiss, the countless associations make you drift off on several tracks and, intentionally or not, somehow you might become a „toadie“[1] yourself. What was it about again? In art? In painting? With Paul Waak? If you dare to purse your lips and get involved, you won‘t just get one free trip.
„Krotte“ solo show 10.-12. Nov. 2023
Art House Rising Berlin
Curation and Text by lucie freynhagen
Fotos: kela-mo
