Christian Tomaszewski: On Chapels, Caves and Erotic Hopelessness

Christian Tomaszewski creates imaginary spaces in which subconscious events take place. One might sense that an important event is at stake, one in which multiple, ambiguous and mysterious layers have accumulated. These spaces tell of enigmatic events that promise to fulfil dreams and wishes and satisfy every demand. Their architecture is constructed in such a way that only the initiated can find their bearings.

Drawing on Schwitters’s work, Tomaszewski replaces the Schwitters column rising from the ground with Brâncuși’s so-called Endless Column, the only point of orientation in the space. Unlike the organically formed grottoes in Schwitters’s compositions, Christian Tomaszewski’s spaces appear orderly, although this order is illusory, for his forms seem distinctly artificial. At the same time, the reference to Schwitters produces a despondency intended by the artist, arising from reflection on the repetition of repetition. Christian Tomaszewski alludes here to the frustration, or blind alley, in which postmodern art finds itself. Ever since Picasso’s reliefs made from waste, the Dadaists’ collages, the beginnings of environments in Schwitters’s Merzbau and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, art has been entangled in an endless reproduction of what already exists. Tomaszewski responds to this problem through his spatial installations. In place of discrete museum displays, since 2004 he has developed the concept of a boundless installation that can be extended and altered in any place over an unlimited period. In this way, the artist gives the installation the spatio-temporal continuity it previously lacked. His installations therefore seem eternal and, in their eternity, secretive.

In developing Schwitters’s formal ideas, Christian Tomaszewski draws a measure of inspiration from the film director David Lynch, although the connection may at times seem difficult to grasp. Particularly compelling in this respect is the accumulation of Lynchian lamps and other light sources illuminating his interior structures. They heighten a surreal situation intended to reveal an order that is no order at all and to single out an event that simply does not exist. This is how a certain spatial anxiety arises, caused by either too much space or too little. It produces an atmosphere of foreboding that also characterises Lynch’s films, in which Tomaszewski is especially fascinated by the direction of light. Although nothing is actually happening, anything might happen. For as long as the viewer remains an outside observer, they can nevertheless feel safe. The moment they dare to enter Tomaszewski’s interiors, or even imagine moving through them, something unexpected or dangerous may occur. Through this contrast, the artist evokes a Romantic dualism, dividing the world into light and darkness, good and evil. It also reflects a long historical tradition reaching back to European Romanticism, when the human attitude towards pristine, untamed nature was first assessed in opposition to advancing industrialisation.

The rift between nature and civilisation, expressed in this Romantic cast of mind, finds its apparent salvation in the Symbolists’ complete retreat from reality. For them, too, the idea articulated in art is unattainable in reality. Despite sharp formal differences — his work is, after all, concerned with processes of installation — Tomaszewski’s artistic thinking contains certain Romantic and Symbolist elements. Humanity’s growing isolation from nature caused despondency not only during Romanticism and Symbolism; on the contrary, since antiquity it has been bound up with the earth and with the sorrow arising from the possibility of losing it, and, as we can see, it persists to the present day.

(translated from German into Polish by Maria Kruk)

Dr Ingrid Mössinger is an art historian and Director General of the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz