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I have known the artist Albert Christoph Reck for 25 years. That is, I first met not him but his wife . In the Kiel Kunsthalle she showed us works of her husband which related to "Reck' s bicycle paths on the Rehn"; she brought recommendations from Alfred Hentzen and Wolf Stubbe. A Reck exhibition and a Rafdziwill exhibition were being opened in the gallery at the same time, an apparent coincidence that really did not seem accidental because, with their ways of communicating objective information from an unobjective world, the two stood quite alone. They appeared not only bizarre but absolutely passe. Museums have meanwhile brought their Radziwill pictures out of the storerooms. And it will not be long before one must own and display a Reck. Nevertheless, in the here and now, both artists will remain strangers among us whether they , like Radziwill, are already dead or, like Reck, are still actively at work.
There are Artists whose work one accepts with complete openness,
without remotely thinking of being swayed by criticism, opposition,
or warning. They are quite places, paradises, heaven on earth. Reck's
works do not possess this classical characteristic of unquestionability.
They do not come "burdenless" ; instead, one must concern himself with them;
one should really acknowledge this(which I do). Every acknowledment involves
a leap. To like and accept Reck's work -- as an important testimonial
to our time -- requires a personal decision, a leap, a conquest. Fixations
are always delimitations that exclude. In the case of an artist like Reck,
one cannot rid himself of that feeling. He belongs to those artists who,
from their extreme subjectivity, can point to conditions, express relationships,
and represent isolated facts in a way that others cannot. They are not one sided,
but comprehensive either.
Albert Christoph Reck is the father of the " new wild ones."
As with them -- the best of them-- so in Reck's case do formal
and color impressions go hand in hand with more or less furious, tense,
urgent, noteworthy personal statements. Reck always speaks to us, mostly
in a direct way. Only occasionally does he love relaxed storytelling,
which even then frequently stands on the pecipice of surrealism, the
abyss of fear and of "the powers of darkness." Reck's pictures have
physiognomies. They look at us , they can hounyt us. Faces, grotesques,
and eyes appear in many of his works. It is not always easy to withstand
those looks.
I have learned much from Reck. For example, we visited together the
Strack exhibition in Kiel. He noticed a remarkable ball of light in
the center of Strack's best pictures. Since then I also see it, for example,
in the works of Hackered. The landscapes of these early classicists are
composed around this ball of light. In Schleswig we walked over the land
bridge from Gottorf Castle towards the court buildings; the sun was setting
on our right. Reck saw the specific peculiarity of the Schleswig light and
was able to describe it. Light clings to the unconventional strokes of Reck's
pen sketches and his colours. It bursts forth everywhere. It is a kind of
luminous base. For that reason his works have something sacred about them,
not because they strove for it but rather because the self-illuminating
light makes them so which Reck can not turn off.
Reck's life, which has been nourished by unbelievably strong forces,
defies description. It eludes definition. It consists of many fragments.
In reality much in the course of his life went to ruin. That will never
be otherwise in the future. Instead of looking at this life -- as far as
we can -- as a paradigm of our time, we look beyond it. Should that, too
never change?
Coburg, October 29, 1985 |
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