To become a painter in the 21st century means to face a problem: Everything has been there before. Over the centuries, colleagues have exploited the canvas’ potentials. They have depicted the visible and the invisible alike. Nature, man and culture have been studied with meticulous care. They have been dissected, copied and perfected from both the inside and the outside. They have finished painting and begun it anew. They have enthralled and shocked audiences – or even worse, they haven’t painted at all. In his pictures, Christian Hoffmann attempts to bring together painting’s different forms of expression. His collage-like approach combines characteristics of Realism, Cubism, Concrete Art, Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism, thus creating multilayered works in both formal and semantic respects.
Harter Materialabbrieb (Rough Material Abrasion), Christian Hoffmann’s most monumental composition up to now, literally exemplifies this approach, presenting us with diverging techniques rubbing each other: graphic and painterly elements, realist accurateness and unsteady dripping, opaque monochrome and gestural eccentricity – the academic and the subcultural. Layer for layer, Christian Hoffmann piles these rough clashes of styles into a composed unit. A drawing’s minute work is covered by a single dash of color. Cryptic tags are scribbled and sprayed on the enrapturing silence of the color fields. The canvas thus becomes a semi-transparent surface, revealing the different layers of materials, working phases and stylistic epochs of the painting. Concealment and conceit create a relief-like effect which characterizes Christian Hoffmann’s style of painting.
The Rough Material Abrasion symbolizes the process to which the painter subjects the work over weeks of rigorous revision. Christian Hoffmann turns around, crops, regroups and paints over the six canvases until the original motif is no longer recognizable. In an act of painting led by intuition and calculation alike, he tries to create a balance between styles, between lines and shapes, between gaudily contrasting colors and muted shades of gray and brown. From each act of destruction a new reference emerges within the painting.
The human body, portrayed realistically, anatomically and expressively in Rough Material Abrasion, is therefore an ever-returning motif in Christian Hoffmann’s works. He is interested in how man is consumed with his own existence. The figures – sometimes heroic, sometimes distorted or disintegrated – demonstrate man’s changing self-perception across shifts of cognition and history and how they find expression in the epochs of art.
The chaos of styles that covers Christian Hoffmann’s canvases thus receives its rounded character. His eclectic compositions not only show an opulent potpourri of art-historic forms of expressions. They also refer to traditions in the history of ideas. Thus, Christian Hoffmann’s work strikes a chord with previous generations as well as with his own. As a painter in the 21st century, Christian Hoffmann considers it his task to reveal, to link and to scrutinize the influences that make up our understanding of art and culture today. Furtively, in the lower left corner, the artist’s hand moves onto the canvas – as if desiring to sort the impressions. This way, it creates a painting about painting.
Translation: Markus. Marschibois
and Lisa Koch