“Parallel Warnings in Simple Arrangements”, Lukas Quietzsc’s exhibition at Ramiken, consists of seven major paintings. Starting from the south wall: an egg yolk sun wearing sunglasses floating in a sunflower protozoa, smiling without a mouth, marveling at the red and green burnouts creeping onto the scene from the Lower Left. Sewn seams throughout suggest previous divisions, but the lines are straight, the seams dead even, and the edges so crisp; this work is gripped by obsessions. Eyes dancing to the left to an encounter with a cartoon child kaiju trampling a city as a series of flattened intersections. One unit goes green: in Quietzsch paintings there is always an exception to all possible rules, suggesting an affiliation with anarchy. Sharing the longest wall and furthest east, a coat of arms dangles down inside a dropping bulb in the middle of bug-eyed mitosis, splitting up to stay in the game. Pattern recognition; compare this paint- ing to the untitled red and gray painting nearest the door. On the back wall, through a thick golden atmosphere, one thousand six hundred seventy three units are visible on a building top, including a possibly infinite vertical stretch of penthouses.
This technicolor architecture overlays a mustard citrus sky that never ends, appropriately installed on the back wall, where all the perspective in the room converges and deepens. The different layers in these paintings, unable to suspend their mutual disbelief, find unexpected harmonies in simply coexisting. Fractals occur naturally, as do the psychedelic subdivisions plotted out on the painting hung on the dividing wall. Chalk grounds swirl on linen under a bird’s eye view of spiralling orange and red hued digressions, accumulating or reducing, depending on whichever came first, the whole or the part. Hard to tell; Quietzsch paints in reverse, in gouache, layering translucence and opacity, with the most solid states sinking under the weight of the color. Dazzle camouflage and literal illegibility go hand in hand on a friend date and end the night in a threesome with self-consciousness. Thankfully none live together, but the memories are wild, taken straight to the grave but for one clue: “WATERCOLOR.” And finally, by the door, an outrageous red screamer, in Albers layers ringing like warm chords on happy gray Sundays, cutouts jumping through electric outlines over soft and playful voids. Again, pattern recognition – back to the sack. Back to the child. Got a stain? Wash it out.
