“It’s not my job to have ideas – that’s better left to others; I read books by poets and philosophers, see images and that’s what I draw and paint.”
From Monday 1 February until Friday 2 April the walls of W139 will be painted with scenes, images and characters from Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. On 12 February 1949 Mann wrote to Albert Oppenheimer: “The hero of the novel, Leverkühn, is an unusually prideful, distant and gifted individual, far too clever for the arts, but who nonetheless fulfills a creative urge and with this, requires unrestraint which, in the idealised framework of the book, can be delivered only by evil. From a more political perspective, his demise mirrors the intoxication of the people by Fascism.”
A novel of great complexity, Doctor Faustus is also a treatise on how art and, with it, the artist, has become autonomous. How it broke away from religious and collective bounds to become a domain accessible only to the isolated individual and how, in this state of permanent self-reflection, erodes the artist’s creative powers.
Various strands of my curatorship and artistic practice converge in this plan: the wish to paint W139 from head to toe at least once; the wish to be instrumental in a collaboration between different artists who transcend the obligatory reference to a shared theme and the endeavour to vanquish the wondrous fear of illustration that has held the visual arts captive for over a century.
Gijs Frieling