WENTRUP is pleased to present Jan-Ole Schiemann's second solo exhibition "By Golly!", at the gallery. The title of the exhibition refers to the eponymous poem by the jazz musician Sun Ra, who died in 1993 and was known for his experimental, avant-garde pieces and already a myth during his lifetime. He polarized critics as well as audiences with his individual style and innovative ideas. Free jazz is a music style that often seems uncontrollably wild at first, but yet follows a formal rhythm in its improvisation and composition. A similar experience occurs when we look at the paintings of Cologne based artist Jan-Ole Schiemann. His pictorial compositions of oil and acrylic paint, drawing ink and oil pencil initially defy interpretation and present a tangle of lines and colors, which after a longer observation gradually reveal their own rhythm. What emerges is an interplay of graphic and organic lines, complex shapes and surreal body fragments, and transparent and colored surfaces. The structures of the pictorial space, created associatively on the basis of stencils and shadowy ink surfaces, seem endless. They are delicately woven to form a superimposed net underneath the works, which, like a collage, includes multiple references from comics, gestural abstraction, and early animation film.
IIn earlier works the lines were always executed in black ink and the transparent-looking color fields in the background, which are responsible for the depth of the paintings, were kept in a grayish beige color palette. His latest paintings are much more colorful. Lines emerge in a rich purple or green, but continue to appear almost black in the center, which only release their actual color towards the bleeding on the edges. The background is also discreetly colored, emphasizing the shifting of the individual pictorial layers even more clearly. However, Schiemann's serial and process-like way of working has remained. Thus, stencils continue to serve him as creative means, prescribing forms that recur again and again in the current paintings. New, for example, are the parallel straight lines, which are sometimes horizontal or vertical, sometimes more in the foreground or more in the background, sometimes grouped in threes or fives. They inevitably make one think of lamellas, whether this is due to the heat wave that was rampant in Germany at the time the paintings were created remains to be seen, although a mood emanates from the works that can perhaps be described with the term "summer paintings". A color palette ranging from green to bright yellow-orange, splashes of blue that immediately make one think of a refreshing splash of water, organic forms with a red center again evoke something floral. At the same time, this mood is also expressed in the titles of the six smaller formats by means of which one can associate the atmosphere of the summer that is now coming to an end: "Ächzer", "Brummer", "Dichter", "Kreuzer", "Stinker" or "2068er". They all reflect in some way hot summer days in the studio and at the lake. And here the circle closes: Sun Ra's poem "By Golly!" was read by the artist on a day at the lake, and he listened to his music while painting in the studio.
Jan-Ole Schiemann (*1983 in Kiel), studied at the Kunsthochschule Kassel and graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He lives and works in Cologne.
