Axel Kasseböhmer’s exhibition will include a selection of twenty works, a combination of landscapes and seascapes painted between 1991 and the present.

It is no surprise that Axel Kasseböhmer’s land and seascape paintings are not produced in the field, in plein air. The simple and far too obvious reason for this is that almost no one today would consider such an activity to be conceptually viable, not to mention practical, in contemporary painting. After the (temporary) establishment of the terms of postmodernism, along with the increasingly virtual image world that permeates more and more corners of the world, it may be that what Michael Baxandall calls the “public’s visual capacity” no longer has space for the plainness of plein air -plein, of course, as in “full.” Nonetheless, fullness seems to me to have been a significant goal for Kasseböhmer from the very beginnings of his career. Emerging as a painter at a time when the larger discussion was about how painting could be emptied out, even in his earliest works-paintings that focus, even fixate, upon appropriations of deceptively incidental details from old master paintings—what comes across is an expectancy of a tangible (and soon to be, in more recent work, quite painterly) comprehensiveness. (According to Kay Heymer, “the details that Kasseböhmer used in his earlier work were no more than starting points, chosen as motifs that were free of literary meaning and sufficiently rich to serve as a premise with which painting might begin.”) At the same time, by working in series, Kasseböhmer also acknowledges that even in the fullness of any pictorial and/or painterly experience there always remains another way of looking at anything.

It is more than likely that no landscape or seascape looks like any that Kasseböhmer has depicted in his paintings. However, I would venture a guess that to him there are those that do. In other words, by painting an image of something that could possibly be (still) sublime while not in its presence (even if it was absolutely imaginary in the first place), Kasseböhmer is clearly mindful that what he is creating is a necessarily mediated and expansive experience of something which is wholly resistant to representation for him as well as for us. This is not to suggest that these paintings record either a hallucination or a nostalgic memory, but rather to propose that they accurately and literally picture what Lyotard has called the “unpresentable,” presenting it as an open incident resistant to absolutes. This may provide an opportunity once again to speak about something as potentially unmanageable as the sublime without reinstalling its oppressive histories of exclusion, purity, etc. – Excerpt from “See still life change” by Terry R. Myers

The above essay excerpt is from the forthcoming book on Axel Kasseböhmer titled “Landschaften – Landscapes”, edited and designed by Wilfried Dickhoff, and featuring essays by Terry R. Myers, Wilfried Dickhoff, and an interview by Wolfgang Ullrich. DuMont Publishing House, Cologne 2006.