Seduction and disruption drive Joerg Dressler’s paintings. I haven’t seen his latest show, Wild Companions, at Alden Gallery through August 20, but for years I’ve tracked his trajectory of reframing beauty. He anchors his pieces in swoon-worthy landscapes that borrow from art history. The old landscapes are rooted firmly in his own past, as well as the collective one.
“[G]rowing up in Germany, my parents introduced me to European art history by taking me to museums such as the Städel Museum in Frankfurt and the Louvre in Paris.” he wrote in an email. “After some of our museum visits, I was allowed to choose a book of my own, and as a young teenager I began learning about painting by copying works from those books. Today, I reference these paintings in certain bodies of work not only because of my deep admiration for them, but also as a way of staying connected to my European heritage.”
Life has changed; it constantly does, and so has landscape painting and our human relationship to nature. Yet we can only plan based on what we know. If we’re rigid in our planning we never truly accommodate life. Joerg plans his process and then opens to the unknown. I see that in Wild Companions: the planning, the allegiance to legacy, and the breaking open to mystery.
Over time, the disruptions in his paintings have escalated from graphic interventions to more dramatic cutouts and revelations in works like Wild Companions, which Joerg writes about here. The title suggests the taut meeting place of tame and feral, order and chaos. The hounds – domesticated beasts, trained to hunt – embody that tension. The scene: A rapturous sunset seascape bumping against a placid grassy vista, both echoing idylls by Claude Lorrain. A still life of fruit and flowers spills across the picture plane – all enticing and placid. Then a jigsaw slice up the middle releases plumes of black-and-white op art and thick smoke, like a genie erupting from a bottle.
The anchor of landscape remains, alluring as ever. Joerg has not destroyed it. Instead, he has complicated it in the way that knowledge and experience complicate the innocent assumptions of childhood. Violent as they are, the ruptures in his paintings are as gorgeous and absorbing as the landscapes, and just as gloriously alive.
Joerg writes:
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