Lenz Geerk, Pears, 2024 Acrylic on paper, 84 x 200 cm

Lenz Geerk, Vampire, 2024 Acrylic on canvas, 180 x 130 cm

Lenz Geerk, Table-Tennis Player, 2024 Acrylic on paper, 41 x 30 cm – Lenz Geerk, Bird, 2024 Acrylic on paper, 41 x 30 cm

Lenz Geerk – Schwarzweiß – 2025

at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, January-March 2025

  “A thing must talk. Sometimes it’s very hard to find the reason why a thing to whom one has dedicated work for so long doesn’t talk.” Joseph Beuys

There is a time out of dates, from which facts have been erased and places forgot their names, populated by living beings, animals and objects mute like stones. Their features have been refused any expression. They are what they do. Of course, this has been written already, about a hundred years ago: “We should stop thinking that this creature does what it is: rather it becomes, for God knows what reasons, what it does. Man makes his own clothes, but clothes make the man too.” Robert Musil 1922. 

Here we are, in 2025, with an artist who paints the clothes hung on the handles of a wardrobe, Joseph Beuys style, adding  a matching pair of shoes, and a vase with flowers. No human in view, pants and jacket are silent. A small figure appears wearing a crown, a king? If it is, he is perfectly dressed, a boy floating on paper. Waiting. So does the bird not really flying, he seems to be sitting on a spot of air. A touch of magic pervades each painted scene if one reads what’s happening, without questions. A naked man walks between mountains in a sort of trance, following a branch of flowers that tickles his nose and loses petals. Fragrance is the living strength of the scene. 

Lenz Geerk, Untitled, 2024 Acrylic on paper, 41 x 30 cm

We rather keep quiet our temptation of putting meaning over everything we see forgetting the silence, the intensity of feelings that refuse to be squeezed in words. They bounce back against us like the small ping pong ball against the naked chest of a player. More and more when one imagines to be one of the standing figures holding the night sky with two hands, as if it was a blanket, or a tablecloth: feelings merge with mythological mirages, turning into a state of wonder. Yet the standing figure, her/his/its face in Gerz’s painting is deprived of expression. It happened, she don’t know what it is. The naked feet are big and steady on the ground.

Lenz Geerk, Woman Holding the Night Sky, 2024 Acrylic on paper, 118 x 101 cm

Feet: are they the steady balance in this colorless landscape? In this painted comedy of errors? Pointless to invent another name: Geerk recalls the vampire, a big figure dressed in black that glides in the blackness of an unknown space. It could be the place where colors were sucked in, and annihilated. Maybe the blood as well. Surrounding fears heavy on every minute of our existence disappear, turning into a nightmare: “a mountain of facts growing larger by the hour, knowledge won, life lost — a failure of the soul.” Let’s turn inside out like a glove our inner, invisible life and Geerk’s paintings will become the images we discover in ourselves if we recuperate “the open-eared attentiveness of the child: expanses; solitude; being led; letting reason growing out of thing and into man.” And women and children…

Lenz Geerk, Woman and Moth, 2024 Acrylic on paper, 41 x 30 cm

Lenz Geerk, Shakespearean Actor, 2024 Acrylic on paper, 41 x 30 cm

Lenz Geerk, Scent, 2024 Acrylic on paper, 87 x 28 cm

Lenz Geerk, Holiday Ceramic Course, 2024 Acrylic on paper, 133 x 82 cm

Lenz Geerk, Painter and Model, 2024 Acrylic on paper, 41 x 30 cm

Lenz Geerk, Untitled, 2024 Acrylic on paper, 41 x 30 cm

Nonsense is not excluded. A painter keeps the model behind her. It is the model who looks at her. The Holiday Ceramic Course is a school en plein air, three people undressed, lost in themselves, as the hands on the ceramics don’t care what they are doing. Impossible not to laugh. Oh the moth! Ugly, fat, big like a butterfly but missing the grace of the far cousin. In European popular culture, butterflies are the open wings of the feminine sex. It’s quite funny to see them replaced by a gigantic moth. No title for the man and the woman so strongly embraced, seemingly forever. They become a painted sculpture: the double stem of a flower, it blooms in their heads. 

After so much inside out between the painter’s mind, mine, and these paintings’, the major feeling I will send through my words remains the same I found in the first sentence, a time without dates. Not arbitrary at all, incorporate in the present as it was in many past situations for centuries, when not so many facts were hovering, written words were spare, most of the visual art lost or unknown. I can be wrong, delusional. Unable to find my way like an ant on the white tablecloth, a painting that strangely represents the classic power of center with a plate full of pears. Be it. Così sia. I eat a pear and read: 

With flowers You write,

O Giver of Life:

with songs You give color,

with songs You shade

those who must live on the earth.

Later You will destroy eagles and ocelots:

we live only in Your book of paintings,

here, on the earth.’

With black ink You will blot out

all that was friendship,

brotherhood, nobility.

You give shading

to those who must live on the earth.

We live only in Your book of paintings,

here on the earth.

I comprehend the secret, the hidden:

O my lords!

Thus we are, 

we are mortal, 

men through and through,

we all will have to go away,

we all will have to die on earth.

Like a painting,

we will be erased. 

Like a flower, 

we will dry up

here on earth.

The Painted Book, after NEZAHUALCOYOTL

A few years ago, Lenz Geerk shrunk his message to the viewers in painted stamps on a monochrome envelope with no address. Today he discloses a song of silence; “ombra mai fu di vegetabile cara ed amabile soave, never was a shade of any plant, more cherished, pleasant and gentle.” (G.F.Handel, opening aria from Xerses)

The painter’s shades, the darkness, are sheltering the cracks in the rational habits, replacing certainties with gentleness, bringing painted flowers already dry, but never dead. With flowers he writes, his Painted Book.

Lenz Geerk, Untitled, 2024 Acrylic on paper, 41 x 30 cm

All the quotes in this text are from Robert Musil, Precision and the Soul

All the images reproduced in this post are by Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Project, Los Angeles, California.

Photos by Paul Salveson

Bibliography

ROBERT MUSIL, Precision and Soul, vols 8 and 9 of Musil’s Gesammelte Werke, Hamburg 1978 The University of Chicago Press, 1990, Paperback edition 1994 Edited and translated by Burton Pike and David S, Luft.

Technicians of the Sacred, Edited with commentaries by JEROME ROTHENBERG, University of California Press, 2017 “Pre-conquest poets and books in Mesoamerica : a written tradition that reenforces and expands the spoken one. … Nezahualcoyotl (1402-1472) author of more than thirty surviving compositions & chief of Texcoco for over forty years. Books were “made of animal skins or of the amate-tree bark, …and the writing itself took the form of pictographs , ideograms & some limited forms of phonetic transcriptions” (Leon-Portilla, Native Mesoamerican Spirituality) p.543.