Lenz Geerk painter born in Switzerland

LENZ GEERK : WHEN COLORS MOVED OUT

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.

Lenz Geerk : MAGIC SOLITUDES

In the exhibition ‘The Table Portraits’ at ROBERTS PROJECTS, Culver City, CA – September-October 2018

 

LENZ GEERK. Untitled, 2018 Acrylic on wool 60 x 40 cm
Courtresy of the artist and Roberts Projects

MAGIC SOLITUDES

by Rosanna Albertini

“I like the way the art world is changing in the last few years, especially since Trump and #Me Too, there is more focus on relevant topics, psychology, society – which for me is often more meaningful than art about art.”  Lenz Geerk

 

The sky is flat and gray over the rain. As gray as the pages of a book Geerk painted with no words inside; only a small branch with leaves  appears, it might be an alien presence. 

There must be something personal I share with Geerk’s paintings. And it is not only a sense of familiarity with a painted world explored by Italian modern artists from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century, such as  Massimo Campigli, Mario Sironi, Filippo De Pisis, Giorgio De Chirico, Carlo Carrà and others – even Amedeo Modigliani. Their sceneries were often called ‘metaphysical.’ Big word in these days, I let it go. Perhaps these Italian artists only preserved an ossified gallery of figures and buildings to replace a landscape of ruins dominated by wars and misery — humans and cities under the same spell —  with imaginary monuments of their minds. Artists avoided resemblances to reality, bringing to life new under-cover mythologies wearing beauty and distance.

LENZ GEERK, Study for Gray Flower, 2018 Acrylic on wool 30 x 40 cm  Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

LENZ GEERK, Bee, 2018 Acrylic on wool 40 x 60 cm    Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

LENZ GEERK, Blue Flower, 2018 Acrylic on wool  50 x 40 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

Although holding some vague echoes from the past, Lenz Geerz figures belong to this present time, and are completely physical. I meet him here. And  I need to keep his painted images as soft as the compressed wool on which they appear. I want to see them through the body of the painted world, many steps before understanding. 

They are all equal in their lack of gaze. Their eyes are closed or they look down, absorbed by the body itself or by it’s action: eyes focused on a gray flower became gray, maybe thinking of a dirty look. Pupils lost among gray pages are opaque, inert like felt. It seems the act of throwing the gaze around, or looking far, is deadly dangerous. The grabbing is questioned: long fingers more like flowers stems than bony limbs, touch  without trying to possess, to appropriate. Yes, reality as we know it has become a disturbing, invasive machinery. The artist isolates his creatures from the ordinary, tired visual language of our time, he lets humor and tenderness take shape apparently without effort, a blue flower on his belly. He is not protesting nor letting go, he calls for intimacy, introversion, and pensiveness. 

These bodies  expose themselves and in so doing they conceal their own secret. Folding, throwing the arms in odd gestures, or magically sitting on the water, birdlike, in a space out of time, they could be boneless figures finally free from  the renaissance myth of the man bringing the whole reality into the measure of his mind, and replicating the fruits of his intellectual power until he can’t control them anymore and starts devouring them, like Chronos with his children.  There is the pressure of reality, but Geerk’s painted images resist, their secret untouched. I don’t want to break it, do not know what the artist had in mind, but I have to the impression to breath a secret pleasure of solitude. 

LENZ GEERK, Pressed Leaf, 2018 Acrylic on wool   60 x 40 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

 

“They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock

They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,

New senses, in the engendering of sense,

The desire to be at the end of distances,

The body quickened and the mind in root. 

They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.

WALLACE STEVENS, The Poem as Icon

 

LENZ GEERK, Beach Scene, 2018 Acrylic on wool 24 x 30 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

 

Each painting is filled with interrogative figures, they are human and yet, they seem to miss something. Their state of mind is sucked into their body. A head, her long dark hair and the hands turn into silent, physical language: while she heavily lays her jaw on a table her hair and hands expand, growing bigger as cats know how to do. It’s a humanscape shaped by sleep’s heaviness, an island smothered by a coat of snow. 

LENZ GEERK, Sleeping, 2018 Acrylic on wool   20 x 30 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

I see myself as one of those figures, a twenty-seven year old woman turning her eyes inside her own body dumped in a large chair surrounded by palms, in the hall of a Parisian student housing. Daydreaming, she was lost in the palms’ movement: hands with more than five fingers, too weak and floppy to grab anything around. In Paris she was completely alone for the first time in her life. She was confused. Suddenly the barricades of books she had physically built in ’68 during the student upheavals, and the imaginary ones she had constructed in her mind, trying to make sense of an incomprehensible decision her parents had taken when she was ten, fell apart all at once.  Dust from the Berlin Wall made her memory even fuzzier. Almost twenty-eight years old! Life doesn’t solidify in the twenties; the only thing one can do is to move on. Her desires had been chopped as well as her hair since she was ten. They both grew again. Not immediately, not fast. I look at her embraced by the chair. I see an immaculate conception taking shape in her mind puzzled by a bundle of feelings. During that daydream, she received a desire of pregnancy she had never had before. I don’t know where such grace came from. From the absence of immediate pressures? From solitudine, perhaps. A few months after, a new life was in her. 

Lenz Geerk is twenty-eight years old. 

LENZ GEERK, The Lovers, 2018 Acrylic on wool   80 x 59.9 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

Bibliography

WALLACE STEVENS, “The Rock” in  The Collected Poems, p.525,  Vintage Books Edition 1990