SEBASTIAN GÖGEL

Gögel defines himself as an abstract surrealist and a demonic existentialist. As an abstractionist, he masters the secrets of metaphysical spatiality and the perpetuum sound of the ‘Harmony of the spheres’. As a surrealist, he fuses this sound with the materiality of naturalistic landscapes—industrial cities, mostly—which seem to be born out of the oneiric fantasies of a cruel God. His existentialism fraternises with the pages of Emil Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist. Cioran writes that humanity is ‘a race of Convulsionaries at the centre of a cosmic farce’. Similarly, the characters in Gögel’s charade are grotesque vampires who are tempted to exist, but never find their way to do so. They have imprinted on the universe the stigmata of their history and shall never be capable of that illumination which would let them die in peace. They can do nothing but glimpse it from the distance, peeking through the slits of a lock. Gögel’s universe is an inferno of shadows mutually devouring each other, only to be digested and evacuated by an Oracle who speaks on behalf of an evil God. Again, just as in Cioran’s ‘atheology’, God is a sinister Demiurge who mocks his creatures, and indeed takes sadistic pleasure in tormenting and torturing them. In such a world, every birth is a ‘misbirth’—perhaps, it would be better not to have been born at all.

Gögel’s paintings are a reverie of shapes and colours. He is thoroughly baroque. Multidirectional movement, bold perspective views, strong chiaroscuro contrasts, sudden lights, trompe-l’œil and polycentric figures—everything is about drama and ornamental energy. As a matter of fact, ornament has come to play a central role in Gögel’s cosmos. As he likes to stress, ornament condenses the effort of a cognitive process. Rohe Gestalt also means that knowledge is expression. Psyche is nothing but a redundance of extroverted signs that allow themselves to be read from the outside. In Gögel’s compositions, it’s hard to tell what happens on the inside and what happens on the outside. Every ‘inside’ is a fold of the outside, but every ‘outside’ is in turn a manifestation of the inside. The word ‘visage’ can, without twisting language, be used for Gögel’s portraits, but also for his suspenseful landscapes and their architecture of symbols. There is no difference here between the city of the mind and the city itself. With forensic precision, Gögel opens the doors of the brain in front of our eyes, and we witness an engulfed machine, which bears the same injuries wreaked on the urban organism.

The machinic is everywhere. Raw form is all in all the machine as human setting par excellence: a noisy, repetitive spinning of engines dynamised unto exhaustion. Gögel brings the progress of this machine into question. His painting turns out to be the diagnosis of a mechanics that has failed to fulfil its function. Overcharged body gears run in circles. They are clumsy demons. Form is cruel: it cannot be inhabited as such.