New works by the artist Jan Christian Pohl in the Saasfee Pavilion in Frankfurt
frankfurt ⋅ And one step back. Astonishing for an artist whose canvases one wanted to call integrated cheerful. Assemblages, brightly colored, sometimes snarky, here and there almost a little overloaded with all the quotes from comics, pop, everyday life and as clandestine as funny references to art history. Until two years ago, more by accident than calculation, instead of the motifs literally picked up from the studio floor, the painting itself became the focus of his pictures, he sewed together muslin, cotton and canvas remnants and worked them with oil and varnish, dispersion, acrylic and ink. Only to turn the resulting painting upside down at the end. Simply because he liked it on the front with all the raised waves, folds and bulges and the traces of the colors on the reverse than the front.
Since then, Jan Christian Pohl, whose current works can be seen in the Saasfee Pavilion, has remained true to the gradual emptying of his paintings. And he disciplined his approach as a painter step by step, further reducing his vocabulary. Not only is it now mainly heavy handmade paper instead of cotton and linen that presents him with the sewn painting grounds of his pictures. The artist, who was born in Kiel in 1975, has also taken a step back in terms of coloring in the series of sheets entitled “Sunday Strip”. He now sets color accents much more subtly, at first glance his painting appears almost black and white. Until one discovers the brightly colored yarn at the seams of the paper, the carelessly stored threads in grass green, orange and neon and notices dust, dirt and tinsel, a lost little screw or the remainder of the adhesive tape that delicately poetically undermines and breaks the progressive strong compositions.