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DAVID REALH
The company I was made for
does not exist here.
H.D. Thoreau - Diary
More than the rational ‘knowing-thinking’ of the philosophers, it is the ramblings, the childishness, the dreams, the ecstasies and vertigo, the ‘without thinking about it’, that form the basis of David Realh's discoveries. It expresses authentic and spontaneous desires, fears, joys, suffering, impulses and memories. He feeds on emotional reactions, in response to external stimuli perceived as provocations.
His drawings suggest an artist who lives each stroke, each line as a means of living out his obsessions through an acute spatial sense. Especially in the complex scenes, this causes the trashy backgrounds to topple and bend as the figures rush towards us...
He who hides his madman dies speechless.
Henry Michaux
‘How rare it is to meet a man who is free, even in thought! We live by rules. Some people are chained to their beds by illness, but we are all chained to the world. I take my neighbour, who is an educated man, into the woods and invite him to take a new view of things in the absolute, to empty his mind of everything that man has established, with a view to making a new start.
Impossible, he remains attached to his traditions and prejudices. He believes that governments, universities, newspapers, go from one eternity to another.’
Henry David Thoreau
Positive de-socialisation.
David Realh translates authentic and spontaneous desires, fears, joys, sufferings, impulses and memories where they are not. He feeds on emotional reactions, in response to external stimuli perceived as provocations.
His drawings suggest an artist who lives each stroke, each line as a means of living out his obsessions through an acute spatial sense. Especially in the complex scenes, this causes the trashy backgrounds to topple and bend as the figures rush towards us...
He who hides his madman dies speechless.
Henry Michaux
The creative process can be described as a temporary, compulsory psychosis. So it's no accident that the artist is ‘mad’: it's a necessity. More often than not, he will not remain in the state of madness; he will merely pass through it; sometimes he will linger. But his norm as an artist always requires him to go through an essential syncopation, a real collapse of the spirit, from which the new will emerge.
Better still, only the new can emerge from this chaos.
This eclipse that shatters consciousness is the very condition of the creative act.
Anton Ehrenzweig - The Hidden Order of Art
IN THE LIGHT OF TRISTAN TZARA
‘I don't want to convince anyone, I don't have the right to drag others into my river, I don't force anyone to follow me, and everyone practices their art in their own way’.
Tristan Tzara - Dada Manifesto
‘Let's try for once not to be right’.
One of the keys to David Realh's work may well be Tristan Tzara, whose real name was Samuel Rosenstock, one of the founders of the Dada movement.
The Rosenstock family was one of the 800,000 Jews who were denied Romanian citizenship under the 1866 civil code, which was in force at the time, because of discriminatory laws, even though the burdens on Jews, including military service, had been increased by the Romanian state1. As a result, the future Tzara and his family were not full citizens of the Kingdom of Romania, and could not vote or travel freely until 1918.
THE SHADOW CAST BY HARALD FALCKENBERG.
‘For me, collecting is a mental and emotional battle, a dream and a trauma, and ultimately a piece of self-realisation in the truest sense of the word.’
Harald Falckenberg's personality is reflected in his collection in Hamburg. This collection is in the spirit of David Realh.
We are not concerned with the good, the beautiful and the consensual. We are critics of representation, of the spirit of seriousness, and of all conformities. We're on the side of irreverence and grotesquerie when it comes to posturing and values like merit and ambition. Scathing humour, facetiousness, the heart is in the margins of the counter-culture whose sources can be found just about everywhere, from English pop art, to the United States with Duchamp as godfather, and above all in Tristan Tzara and the Dada movement of 1914-1918.
The intimate, asocial life leads to a questioning of all ideological, aesthetic and political conventions and constraints.
This is the spirit of Harald Falckenberg's collection and that of David Realh's work.
