Dr. Eva Wattolik about Udo Reins Kim Lost-War

HF1G423, a sober series of letters and numbers, Ministerio de Justicia, HAVANA and MURDER. Above it, a vulgar open, female mouth, relaxed tongue against the teeth, erotic in its softness and yet strangely lifeless. On the right edge of the picture we can see the face of a young woman in various close-ups, dismembered and painted over, the dark curls, the unfocused eye and again the open mouth, painted red like that of a cheap slut. The fragments of the picture arranged in a circle seem to turn anti-clockwise; they drive the observer's gaze around. The eye jumps restlessly from mouth to nose, from mouth to eye and back again and like a projector puts the individual pieces together in a sequence of pictures. You feel reminded of the fast pace of a psycho thriller where the tension builds and the eye gazes full of horror on something incredible, in a flash focuses on it again and tries to take it in. The same principle of repetition is found in the left half of the 100 x 100cm picture. On the lower part of the picture the observer's gaze is directed into a great distance on two provocative pink-white shimmering stiletto shoes. They seem to have been left carelessly in the wet grass and, as if to emphasise their essential importance, we find them again further up on the right of the picture.

The shoes in the wet grass suggest an unexpected and unsettling find one morning, a remainder of the previous night that brings a subtle threat to daylight. A similar situation is found at the beginning of David Lynch's film "Blue Velvet" (1986) when Jeffrey Beaumont finds an amputated ear in the grass and is subsequently drawn further and further into a mad, never quite comprehensible story of brutal violence and sexual perversion. Of course, Rein's scene also poses the question of where the owner of the shimmering shoes is; perhaps she went home barefoot the previous night and, if so, why didn't she take her shoes with her? The idea that a few steps further, the woman is sitting in the grass, resting, will hardly occur to the watcher. The fragments of text repeated several times in the picture, Ministerio de Jusitcia/TRIB. PROV. POP./CIUDAD de la HABANA/MURDER/ R.M.T. TON. 4,/TARA 1.600 KS, include key words which could have been taken from a police observation reports. We are thus on the trail of a violent crime and find ourselves immediately in the role of Jeffrey, who, fascinated with the twilight of the underworld, becomes a detective.

"KIM LOST-WAR" takes up a classic theme in the history of art, music and literature: love and death. One of the most well known examples from music is Franz Schubert's (1797-1828) string quartet "Death and the Maiden" (1824-1826), in which death becomes a courting lover: Give me your hand, you lovely, gentle thing!/I'm a friend and have not come to punish you./Have courage! I am not wild,/you shall sleep softly in my arms! Today's pop music, too, occasionally touches on the theme of the fatal lover. The red mouth here stands, as it often does, for the erotic power of seduction of the woman. Thus, in Kylie Minogue's and Nick Cave's "They Call Me The Wild Rose" (2002) the murderer and victim join together in a duet full of seductive and morbid beauty. Here it is the red mouth of the innocent Eliza Day who arouses the passions of a psychopath. He proves his love for her in an oppressively romantic staged act of murder on the bank of a river.

A song which is a particularly good comparison with "KIM LOST-WAR" is Falco's "Jeanny!" (1985), which reached top places in the hit lists of 1986 and yet was extremely controversial, being seen as an understated aesthetic presentation of a sexual murder. Here is the red mouth again, which at the very beginning attracted the attention of the man: Your lipstick is smudged/You bought it and/And I have seen it/Too much red on your lips/And you said "Don't come on to me"/But I saw through you (...). At this place the distorted perception of the perpetrator becomes obvious; he interprets a clear rejection from the woman as a ploy. Afterwards you wonder mistrustfully: Why is Jeanny with this man at all? Why is she lying alone on the ground of an evening forest? And where is her shoe?

Jeanny, come, come on
Get up - please, you'll get wet through
It's late, come - we've got to get away,
out of the wood, you understand?
Where's your shoe, you lost it,
when I showed you the way.
Who's lost? Yourself?
Myself? Or, or, we, ourselves, both?

At the end of the song a newsflash is blended in, reporting the dramatic rise in missed persons. According to police information, the last missed person is a nineteen year old girl, who presumably has fallen victim to a crime. Although a name is not given, we assume from the context given that it must be Jeanny. Our suspicion that a crime has occurred seems to be confirmed when the newsreader reports: "JEANNY LOST". Yet, despite all, we never become quite certain, as is similar in Rein's picture. Our imagined picture solidifies merely through a certain conclusiveness of suggestive stimuli.

The highly emotional connection of "Sex & Crime", included in the sober records of an actual police report, is known to us from all kinds of news media, which must compete for the attention of its consumers every day: whether it's the sensational headlines of the tabloid press, the shimmering glossy magazine or the news magazines of private television and Internet companies. One popular method of creating tension in television news is the "breaking news", which burst with unmissable explosiveness over the current report. They satisfy the watchers' desire for sensation and therefore provide great entertainment value. They also give the impression of being constantly informed at once of all the important developments in the world. The competition between different strands of news, characteristic really of the information structure of the Internet favours however the distraction of the viewer rather than sustained explanation.

Rein's works have much in common with the picture language of film and especially with that of news broadcasts. In his "Stripe Series", which he has been working on since 2002 and which includes "KIM LOST-WAR" the artist analyses the language of colours in television programs and uses them as impressions of colour in painting. The red stripe found in the upper part of the picture of "KIM LOST-WAR" thus quotes the presentation of Breaking News in news broadcasts from CNN (Cable News Network). These are also inserted in a red stripe across the screen. In addition to this, the artist uses still scenes photographed from the screen of self-made sequences of film created on journeys all over the world. In this way, the stiletto shoes from the opening sequence of his short film "Stripe Series 2006" appear in scenes of people from widely differing places - Ibiza, Cuba, Valencia, Brussels, amongst others - in four horizontal, parallel stripes running opposite to one another and underlaid with original sound play.

Rein releases the individual pictures of the celluloid strip from their context, cuts them apart and mounts them in his painting to create a whole picture again. In this way he is basically adopting the working methods of an editor at the editor's desk. Yet while the latter divides the film strips of raw material for the finished film and puts them into a consciously decided order, Rein breaks up the chronological order and condenses the underlying order of pictures to the simultaneity of a single picture. Through the sequence of the process of his reception the observer again dissolves the simultaneity into sequences of movement and associative strands of stories. In this context the strategy of repetition is important; this plays an important role in quick edited films above all, to hammer home a certain message for the overwrought observer. Motifs like the red painted mouth or the high-heeled shoes thus become loaded with meaning.

In "KIM LOST-WAR", too, the observer finds it difficult to overcome the complexity of the picture. This lies not only in the carved up order of the photographic motifs but also in the high differentiation of the coloured surfaces. Rein puts different layers of paint over each other; they overlap in parts, the transparent allow the layers beneath to shimmer through, burst out, pearl away from each other and mix with each other again. Right from the undercoat acrylic and oil colour are mixed, they combine with each other at times, separate at others and thus give the effect of bursting out from one another. Over these lie sketches and collages of found materials, as well as lines of text, which emerge from the tangle of the surfaces and then disappear again like ideas from the depth of the unconscious. All these layers are finally sealed with a coat of yacht varnish or lacquer, which let the colours glow like those of a glossy magazine. The bar code in the picture, below right, is an expression of cheap mass goods and replaces the signature of the artist.

Some time of concentration is needed to reach a half-way stable ordering of the connections between the pictures. Only after some time do you recognise, on the left, a large drawing of a lorry which Rein made in Havana. It can well be fitted in to the existing constructed story of the murdered woman. Yet the lines written in charcoal seem to come from a completely different context; horizontally over the picture runs the text: IN 1964 WE FROZE, ask anybody, we froze as if we were in an/Icebox, from morning to evening./WE FROZE, FROZE, FROZE all the time/AT NIGHT WHEN WE WERE SLEEPING. The technique of repetition plays an important role here, too. It lends the text something insistent, yet without leading to a clarification of the mysterious content. We understand only that in 1964 some people must have been quite cold.

These lines of text are actually excerpts from an explanation exhibited in the museum of the former prison on Robben Island. Numerous political prisoners of the Anti-Apartheid movement were accommodated here, e.g. Nelson Mandela (*1918). Rein had photographed the text on a visit to the national memorial. One prisoner had made clear the harshness of conditions: The stonework of the cells was so damp that the inmates of the rooms actually "dried it out by living there". The fact that such accommodation is not only not particularly pleasant but also, in the long term, unhealthy, is obvious. The text thus tells of the suffering of physical violence in a political context. The aspect of the influence of physical violence again connects the report, as absurd as this may at first seem, with the red mouth and the shoes, as long as we remain here with the assumption of a violent crime. The coldness of the prison dungeon becomes an expression of a coldness in emotions and refers to a "cold", therefore cruel world, as Falco also uses as a metaphor in his ironic refrain - Such a lonely little girl in a cold, cold world. The overall view of contexts which do not really belong together and are heavily morally loaded relates also to the sales-promoting strategy of a news magazine which wishes to satisfy its consumers' hunger for sensation.

If war is understood as the prototypical form of physical violence, the title "KIM LOST-WAR" becomes an expression for a person who is fighting for her survival within the society surrounding her - and fails. This is a leitmotif in Rein's WAR pictures, which tell of people who suffer physical and psychological oppression, whether through the thought control of a totalitarian communist regime or through capitalist consumer forces and incapacitating overflooding of information. There is the thoughtful looking Cuban girl in "WAR-BUS" (2006), brought to Fidel Castro's speech at Revolution Square, whose cheerful national flag lies in the dirt in the bottom part of the picture, or the man in "SEPARATE-WAR" (2006), who looks like a comical Father Christmas, yet lives on the margins of existence and is almost swallowed up by the infernal black-red of the picture.

Beneath the smoothly varnished surfaces of Rein's pictures glimmers a nightmarish abyss, filled with the pain, forlornness and the insanity of human existence. This abyss can also be found in the reports of news magazines. Yet while the television viewer is largely at the mercy of a numbing flood of sensation and information, the observer of Rein's pictures can allow reflection on the strategies and the actual contents of what is shown and perhaps also the desire for the recovery of genuine humanity and personal empathy.

Dr. Eva Wattolik