RHYTHMIC ENGAGEMENT
Maximilian Rödel & Lisa Tiemann
MAY 13 — JUN 26, 2021
During an informal interview, a journalist confronts Jacques Derrida to the ineludible question about love. He groans, conflicted about the broad ambiguity on the posed inquiry. Later on, he proposes the reflection of whether love dwells in that other as an absolute singularity—the who—or on the way that someone is, the details—the what. He then continues with how love often starts with seduction, a seduction that lies in that other‘s specificities. Seduction as an act that challenges the senses; it distorts them, rejoices in their combination. It gains its effect in coupling tactility with aroma, visuality with the weight or delicacy of words, their intonation, their performativity: The materiality of that body in front of oneself.
If successful, this seduction consolidates into a relation, this bizarre shape of companionship that holds in its core secrecy, intimacy, even the development of a secret shared language, one that escapes words. This tacit communication renders visible when encountering the work of Lisa Tiemann and Maximilian Rödel. There is an intangible dialogue in their practice that crystallizes on layers of paint, chromatic choices, even in the playful attitude of subverting matter and form. It is complicity.
In Lisa Tiemann‘s ongoing sculptural series of Couples, she collects a series of unintentional forms through sketches, which she then selects and translates into solid shapes. They are then meticulously juxtaposed, one against the other, seeking their fit into harmonic two-folded bodies bringing a sensorial material dialogue into play. Like a spark, the contact between the two bodies occurs: cheek to cheek, head to head, forehead to forehead, then nose to nose, and almost mouth to mouth, the infinite tenderness of this couple 1 yet remaining each part as an inalienable unit.
Hence, by opposing balance upon tension, lightness upon gravity, docility upon roughness, Tiemann‘s work creates a unique language that defies static attributes and signs by dislocating material properties; the symbolic mastery of forms—seduction, challenge, reversibility ². In her sculptures, she devoids ceramics and paper maché from their fragile connotation by shaping them into geometric, stark, sensuous forms engaging with latex, rubber, steel rails, or colored sand. Suddenly the works unfold into apparent weightless hybrids of concrete, iron, and stone.
Maximilian Rödel‘s paintings speak of a very intuitive use of color that goes beyond the canvas. The overlapping layers of oil come on gradual strokes that run across the surface, however, recognizing the needs that each canvas communicates to him. He does not rush to cover it in its entirety; at times, he allows to reveal silences and fragments of the canvas‘s raw materiality. The painting gives away hints of the process, recording the dialogues with time and physical or natural incidence that occurred on the way.
Rödel works on several canvases at the time, a fragmented plot divided into different pictorial episodes. Nonetheless, each picture possesses a narrative of its own murmured to the observer during the intimate act of contemplation. It unfolds as the sight wanders on its surface. Each stroke is a part of the story only subtly signalized in the choice of the titles. A painting lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer³.
In the works presented in this exhibition, it is possible to trace the permeable boundaries of complicity between Lisa‘s and Maximilian‘s practice in relation to or in the exposure to one another. Therefore, Rhythmic Engagement intertwines a ludic conversation based on a dynamic of selection and response between the two artists. Each selected piece triggers the connecting trait of the responding one. The exhibition hence portrays how these unique folds of the body⁴ turned into a body of works.
Lorena Moreno Vera, 2021