Where are We, Nathan Egel? By German Art Advisor, Thomas Wessel, PhD
“It’s a good thing that his application to the academy in Leipzig was unsuccessful. The reason: A special talent could not be established.”
If I were to sum up crossing paths with German art advisor Thomas Wessel, I would start with the most memorable initial meeting in 2007, his introduction and walk-through of the sublime artworks in the corporate collection of an international brand, of which Wessel was then steward. There I discovered the work of Jacob Lawrence (American 1917-2000). The odyssey continued over the years; visits to Germany’s picturesque Black Forest, international art fair meet-ups and as an overnight guest of Dr. Wessel and his gracious wife Niki in their nature-filled home. These events most certainly blurred the lines between being colleagues and friends. Fast forward.
I have over the years looked forward to Tom’s emails which seem to arrive during the times when my soul needed willful pick-me-ups and pleasant distractions. And so they were. Tom chronicled his and Niki’s and his daughter Nanni’s experiences in emails with subject lines such as: Black Forest calling; never too late to wish happiness, health, prosperous 2018; Before books burn; Some snow to cool down; Job Offer: we welcome refugees from the US in case you need a bread and butter job. Catch of the day was the the subject line to an email containing recipes of Mediterranean Spinach, Paprika-roasted Cabbage and Green Beans with Caper Vinaigrette and Kale-Chip Crumbs - that went on to say, Since we cannot invite you to the Art Basel terrace lunch this time, we would like to share some artists recipees which we will prepare…The meals will be served with bio dynamic wines which I helped to harvest last autumn at our friend’s vineyards, they will be Grauburgunder (Pinot Gris) and Rosé. An email with pictures of: cows I had to guide back after they broke out from our neighbor’s fence, along with a photo with caption Nathan Egel, a young painter’s studio in the village nearby.
From the photo I surmised the artist’s studio was terrifyingly cold, drafty and dusty, but the detailed art composition on the wall was intensely captivating. I imagined the artist spending hours in a damp environment creating art in the style of the old masters. I wondered how long it took to get the composition to this point.
In following up with Tom’s email I was curious about the work of Nathan Egel. I wanted to hear about what resulted from the artist’s creative time spent in that studio space - especially as a catalog Dr. Wessel created about his work recently netted recognition among 100 Beautiful Books by Foundation Buchkunst. And so, I invited Dr. Wessel to create a guest post with abridged material from the catalog.
Where are We, Nathan Egel?
The painter Nathan Egel has been nesting in the hall of the “Alte Wäscherei” in Müllheim, which measures 50 by 25 meters and with ceiling 15 meters high, since 2014, and this is where he works between his extended journeys. The need to finally clean up and to repair the broken windows is utterly foreign to him. It would also be completely uneconomical, since the temporarily rented hall is eventually going to be torn down and yielded to more lucrative plans. For the time being, however, the constellation is ideal: a very vital sanctuary for the painter and his entourage in his home town, within walking distance from where he lives, it is also an indoor playground for a big Doberman who is allowed to frolic around as much as he likes and is therefore a peaceful canine.
Whereas there are plenty of such spaces in every big city—chaotic studios on the one hand and painting factories optimized for efficient supply chains on the other—in the country, where everything comes across as clean and tidy, it is rather unusual to find such an airy hall in which all of the utensils merge, so to speak, into its topsy-turvydom, a hodgepodge of tools and machine parts, a permanently changing stockpile of props. One is spontaneously impressed by the painterly laissez-faire of this awkward disorder, and one realizes that the casual amassing of objets trouvés that the artist happens upon belongs to the rules of the house. The painter’s pickings.
It soon becomes apparent why everything seems so conspiratorial. The originators of this regular aesthetic of visual distraction are quickly enumerated: remnants of carelessly discarded packaging, used painter’s supplies, blankets with dabs of paint on the floor patterned with blotches of color and commonplace throws on a junky sofa, shiny musical instruments, ramshackle bicycles from a bankrupt repair shop, plates with paint on and underneath them, a multiple déjà vu, and the painter has a touching encounter with, memory of, and draws inspiration from everything in the room.
If one returns later, one notices it immediately: the in-house potential for inspiration and the progress of the numerous paintings being worked on simultaneously balance each other out, and the suspicion grows that the paintings in such a place can never be finished. It can only be intentional to delay the conclusion, to lie in wait for the delights of self-criticism, to take pleasure in self-reflecting on the paintings. Even when a painting calls out: away with me, I’ve got to finally get out of here, I’m “finished”—the painter does not listen, is deaf, continues to believe that he knows better.
Maybe the painting is stubborn and the painter realizes that it is over. Any glassblower can do that, let go instead of learning from setbacks. However, as long as a picture does not leave this atmosphere, the untidy studio mode seduces the painter to continue doing what he does. How can there be a finished painting as long as it is exposed to his origination chaos? All the clutter there, full-fledged junk, and how everything lies scattered around among unfinished pictures—one believes it to be creative décor. Yet this is the place where waste from the creative process is not ordinary squalor, where visually combined, random collages out of refuse or loose ends become art.
Here, the tools meander in this former laundry without slide projection obstacles and without role model filters. What was flushed out are the objets trouvés used in the fluid process of inspiration and how they lie about everywhere in what seems to be careless disregard—in fact, they are forms and colors of waste and chance that delight in being looked at.
Both waste and chance supply the artist with the energy to be inspired. Albeit without any sense of security for painting, absolutely no nest warmth for the paintings that are never finished anyway: it is simply a drafty hangar where the fermenting particles floating in the free oxygen of the large hall produce more robust force against and resistance to academically boring models than in a sophisticated studio for artsy consumption.
“The young painter better not get used to himself too quickly,” his counterparts cavil and protect his arcanum from a craving for lifelong fame. However, this is where we meet the special situation of a young painter who settled in intent on staying in foreign parts.
Family Portrait
In the painter’s as of yet young oeuvre, a noncommissioned family portrait that he painted within a period of three months is of particular relevance. During the tension-filled process of unobserved observation of family members with all of their individual and yet similar physiognomies, typical patterns of behavior, postures, clothing preferences, and flair, the painter’s own means of expression and variations in style struggled through the traditionally suggested atmosphere in numerous new versions, over-paintings, and compositional changes. What emerged is an overwhelmingly stimulating togetherness in this family portrait, whose multifaceted messages descendent family members will surely have fun discovering.
A couple of elements will perhaps be regarded as symptomatic for our age: the organic labels as insignias of middle-class gustatory culture and environmental awareness on the symbol-laden apples mischievously contrast with the aristocratic pathos of the enthroned couple, the page, and the youngest offspring as a condottiere on horseback.
The disharmoniously fractional coloration and the deconstructivist figuration operate as stylistic features typical of the time. Whereas in his day van Dyck presented the lithe sensuousness of aristocracy, today, Nathan Egel immerses his portrait in a multifaceted kaleidoscope of stylistic quotes as carriers of meaning for the contemporaneity of his protagonists.
This emblematically composed situation from 2017/18 could also be related to a conversation between the artists Anselm Kiefer, Jannis Kounellis, and Enzo Cucchi that took place in 1986 and in which they discussed the following:
Kiefer: The fact that the bourgeois class no longer exists is a symptom of something more deep-seated; whether bourgeois class or not, a discussion about morals took place in the paintings themselves. … The structures are broken. The structure-setting class is absent. And what now makes our profession so difficult is that we have to be both: we have to draw up laws and at the same time oppose them as well.
Cucchi: The artist also has to replace aristocracy …
Kounellis: Aristocracy was already destroyed much earlier. It was conquered by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, however, was not conquered by anyone; it destroyed itself from within—without a revolt.
Kiefer: Indeed, most rulers gave themselves up, such as Louis XVI in the French Revolution.
Kounellis: Yes, when they lacked a vision of power—like in Europe now.
Cucchi: Because we have no vision. At the moment, people have a weak vision. Today, artists have to verticalize a painting.
Abridged quotes from: Ein Gespräch—Una Discussione (Zurich, 1986), p. 12
No Idea
But then the viewer is captivated by the amplification of this inexplicable puzzle in which fiction, comics, the style of the Old Masters, and graffiti are complexly combined without revealing the narrative.
Does it need a narrative? Does there have to be one? Can’t I get along without one? Do figurative elements have to provide the beginning and the ending? There is nothing rational about this deconstructed room anyway, but perhaps surreal? Fine with me. The fun factor associated with obscuration becomes more apparent. The more sophisticated skill manifests in the surprising quotes, for instance a pale, skeletonized Füssli at the right edge—or the head of a horse by Picasso from the 1940s.
However, the painter is not having any of it, because he is not familiar with it and the quotes therefore play no role. The fact that the eye-catching blue blowfish with shark teeth does not swim in his water element but has slid into the painting like an intentional piece of graffiti and looks comical more than it does dangerous, may reveal something about the painting process. The overpaintings on the fish head, namely the blood-spewing goblin—borrowed from Grünewald’s Isenheimer Alter, so to speak—above the plasma red dog, a crippled nude, and a hideous long-tongued face count among the typical arsenal of extras, whose purpose seems to be to divert one’s gaze to the nearest or most distance neighbor in the teeming crowd.
It is not that Nathan Egel runs on adrenalin and feels compelled to draw at all times and everywhere. However, if he is at a concert, for example, and wants to quickly communicate something to the person sitting next to him, he can do so very quickly by means of a drawing and text. Hence his notebooks, always warm to the touch, feature sketches of everyday situations that seem hilarious when the associations he experiences are incorporated into the drawing.
The fascinating thing about them is the accuracy of typical postures in motion, of spatial moods of light, and of distinct facial expressions. Menzel turns up, sometimes Macke, and it is baffling how keenly and relentlessly precise it escapes his hand. Forceful expression in particular by means of a minimum of technique, and in those places where it happens delicately and smoothly, erotically, or bursting with strength, one no longer understands how he moves the open into the resolute onto paper.
It’s a good thing that his application to the academy in Leipzig was unsuccessful. The reason: “A special talent could not be established.”
Let’s see, dear readers and viewers, what conclusion you come to in the long run. Here are several examples from his series of Wächter:
Dialogue with Nathan Egel’s Drawings and Watercolors
What we encounter in his drawings are actually theater backdrops: individually focused people, animals from close up, populated landscapes with saturated tones of light and clouds in freshly tempered coloration. So this is the scenario of the artist as an observer who instantly selects his stage from the flow of life and decides who in his view assumes what role. During his travels, when strolling and pausing, regardless of where he believes to be unobserved himself and all alone, he is inspired by an object, the striking pose of a passer-by, an averted glance, an intense gesture.
This is what Nathan Egel has to say about it: “I invest in the life of my pictures.”
These pictures are intended to convince us by means of their inspiring representation. His scenographies illustrate real situations that one can actually experience on a stage. Egel takes us along into his travelling life; we observe what he observes. The best thing about such a tandem journey are the farewells at milestones, and each drawing is such a milestone at which our paths go separate ways. While we continue to look at his drawings, the artist himself has long since set out again with his vital curiosity and his cunning eye.
Why else look at pictures?
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Credit: Photographer, Wolfgang Selbach.