Maximilian Rödel
Story of the Forgotten Light
25. Februar – 10. April 2022

The Kunstverein Arnsberg e.V. is showing Story of the Forgotten Light, a solo exhibition of current works by the Berlin painter Maximilian Rödel, born in Braunschweig in 1984.

In his large-format oil paintings, Maximilian Rödel presents colour - and its inseparable link to light - as a powerful elemental force that manages without any form. In doing so, he consistently goes beyond his artistic predecessors in this field, such as Colour Field Painting. His worlds of colour are even able to dissolve the formal boundaries of the picture on its surface: The multiple layers of highly diluted oil colours create an atmospheric depth and dynamism that extends into the viewer's space.
Im ungreifbaren Zustand zwischen purem Farblicht und Materie geben die Bilder eine Ahnung von Transzendenz, dem ewigen Wandel von Materie und Energie.

They are inherently dramatic, even in the original sense of narrative: Their monumental format and classical technique are reminiscent of old master history or landscape paintings. But Maximilian Rödel does not paint from nature; rather, his paintings - always in a slightly portrait-like format - are pictures of the unseen, they give an idea of prehistoric or post-anthropocene situations that are never seen by the human eye. Maximilian Rödel thus creates genuinely new, tangible realities.

We gaze in amazement at the images like uncovered fossils that exist completely independently of us and yet now communicate themselves directly. We can neither categorise nor understand them rationally, nor can Maximilian Rödel explain them: he lifts them out of the depths of universal, timeless memory, frames them, narrates them like an ancient epic that communicates its truth more in its rhythms and sounds than in its words, and in their overwhelming immediacy, the images touch the individual in all viewers: their own memories, the forgotten, the repressed, visions.