Remembrance of Things Past
Elger Esser's Melancholy
Landscapes
Elger
Esser, Ameland-Pier X
Courtesy
Elger Esser © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2008
A
seemingly unending horizon blending sea and sky: Elger Esser's stark
photograph of a North Sea pier can be seen in the exhibition True
North at the Deutsche Guggenheim. The works of the German photographer
evoke the sublimity of romantic landscape painting and old picture
postcards. Yet Esser is uninterested in sentimental nostalgia. An essay by Alexander
Pühringer.
Elger
Esser, 75 Saint-Jean de Luz, 2004
Courtesy
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg/Paris
The
Romantic era is an
epochal syndrome of culture that reverberates to this day. Particularly in
Germany's intellectual history, it anchored itself on the borderline
between a southbound longing for antiquity in the Idealism
of Winckelmann, Goethe,
and Schiller and the
perilous sublimity of the ice and everlasting night of the European North.
In his landscape images, the German artist Elger
Esser repeatedly examines the duration and endurance of a concept of
nature that points beyond the sublimity of mental experience, opening the
pictorial plane to reveal a boundlessness that embodies Schleiermacher's
definition of religion as a "sense and taste of the infinite."
Elger
Esser, Piriac sur Mer, Frankreich, 2006
Deutsche
Bank Collection
As the founding
Romanticists Clemens
Brentano, Achim
von Arnim, and Joseph
Görres saw it, at least in the high phase, the experience of
nature was an initiation game of the gods. The desire was to discover
unknown landscapes, which then served as catalysts for entire volumes of
books. The world's maps were still being drawn, the forests, seas, and
rivers still contained secrets, some of them terrible, that called out to
be revealed.
Elger
Esser, 11, Ault, 2004
Courtesy
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg/Paris
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Elger Esser's studies of idylls offer a corollary to the
wish to be cradled in a whole, intact world. Traces of civilization,
partially identifiable, enter the pictures quietly and are not
artificially retouched. A vague sense of the world's beginnings inhabits
these blurry, familiar images of a longing for a world not yet caught up
in the process of destruction and decay, when the human quest for
civilization was still at one with nature’s cycles.
Elger
Esser, 268 Le Havre II, 2006
Courtesy
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg/Paris
Just
as the Romanticists once collected poems for Des
Knaben Wunderhorn (literally, The Youth's Magic Horn) to
preserve their cultural tradition, Elger Esser has amassed thousands of
postcards over many years in order to grasp a disappearing world—even if
only as a catalogue of panoramic views. His work does not shy away from
depicting nature's terrors and their superiority over humankind; his
hand-colored large-scale formats of the surging foam of stormy seas or a
series of shipwrecks battered against the shoreline visually record an
attempt to draw nearer to times past.
Elger
Esser, 4027 Biarritz, 2005
Courtesy
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg/Paris
Similarly
to Torquato Tasso,
who at the end of Goethe's drama
compares the artist's existence to the eternally stranded ship that
nonetheless, unerringly, sets for sea only to be swept ashore again, Elger
Esser's artistic work explores the rapture of the human experience of
nature. This is something we are losing more and more in the face of the
individual's dissolution into virtual worlds of simulation that Jean
Baudrillard equated with symbolic exchange and death. Despite this,
Esser, who grew up as the son of a photographer and poet in Rome, is not a
nostalgic Romantic; rather, he seeks out its traces in the existing. He
does not see basic aesthetic parameters like resolution, dissolution of
boundaries, and endlessness as Caspar
David Friedrich did—as an artistic means of deciphering the world—but
acts as someone wandering, traveling, and thinking along existing
footsteps.
Elger
Esser, 2007, Frankreich, 2007
Courtesy
Elger Esser
Restorative theories of society
are as little responsible for his vedutae and landscapes as are the
pseudo-religious, substitute fantasies of today's lost individual. The
melancholy inscribed into many of his images recalls a loss of memory, a
realization that much has been irrevocably lost and will never again
return. In all the theories concerning the infinity of the universe, the
limitations of time within a life always remain a given. This is what
constitutes their magic, their seduction, and their beauty. Rilke
defined it as the beautiful that always borders on the horrible; Elger
Esser's pictures are not the formulations of romantic kitsch, but aim for
the aesthetic expression of sadness and the conscious experience of loss.
In this respect, his aesthetic project clearly correlates with the longing
for antiquity in German Idealism and the need to call its gods archaic.
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