Reminder of the Present
von Sebastian Preuss

These pictures have a pull that one cannot really explain at first. Nothing exciting is shown: deserted streets leading somewhere into a placeless topography, lonely benches, parks and rest areas, inconspicuous utility buildings, railway crossings, bus stops, a garage yard or a clubhouse, again and again the faded walls in abandoned cultural buildings from GDR times. Occasionally one or two young people stray into these inhospitable landscapes, and then you ask yourself: what are they actually doing here? Even the painterly means are not aimed at spectacular effects. On the contrary, the colouring is muted and pale, everything tone in tone, the faded violet, the earthy colours, lots of beige and yellow and brown. In addition, the pictorial world is covered by a gossamer blur. Everything seems somehow detached, unspectacular, without highlights. Nothing happens that could quickly overwhelm us.

But it is precisely in this strange mood, which cannot easily be put into words, in this aura somewhere between the banality of everyday life and unreal magic, that the great charm of Eric Keller's paintings lies. Many of them seem like frozen stills from a melancholic road movie, and one does well to engage with the quiet drive. Patience pays off, because the longer you look at the pictures, the more their layers of content and aesthetic depth reveal themselves. Then the motifs in their supposed ordinariness and "normality" turn out to be something quite extraordinary, namely as such sophisticated compositions that nothing in them is interchangeable or conceivable elsewhere. They are the perfect moments of a memory work that picks out of myriads of visual experiences those visual grains that can trigger an extraordinary work of art.

Keller's painting style is also a quiet sensation. The often large areas of colour are only monochrome at first glance; in reality they have a multifaceted inner life. They oscillate in their nuances, develop in the sky of the landscapes from dull grey to subtly glowing orange, from yellowish blue to pink, on the streets to darkened asphalt or brightened violet. By repeatedly painting over his formations, Keller reveals refined layers of depth beneath the surfaces. Thus each colour is composed of different colours, layered on top of each other, translucent in thin streaks, sometimes stringy, sometimes fine-grained, sometimes diffusely dissolved as if in an acid bath. Keller confidently demonstrates his skills by looking into disused cultural buildings and inns, mostly in his native Saxony. There he is fascinated by the faded wall colours that are in the process of disappearing. What the course of history and the dissolving power of nature brought about in the real buildings leads Keller to create a particularly complex painting on canvas. In his work, the depictions of decay become washed-out or torn, cloudy or trickling abstractions - masterly cabinet pieces in which one wonders again and again whether a wall or a picture within a picture is actually meant here.

The more intensively one looks, the better one's eyes grasp the transparent, vibrating and iridescent richness of Keller's colour fabrics. Beyond representational depictions, his paintings are also manifestos of what can be achieved with the means of painting. But Keller does not work conceptually. He does not need a theoretical underpinning and does not load his paintings with calculated references. Intuition and the inner visual memory play an important role. Unlike most representational painters today, he does not use photographs as models. "Everything I paint I have seen in real life," Keller explains. "But I don't capture anything in the landscapes and architectures, nor do I take photographs. At that moment on site, I don't yet know that a painting will come out of it." An unconscious saving. When painting, Keller returns to the spaces and topographical situations in his imagination. But he must have actually experienced all the impressions. "Otherwise they don't become usable for me."

It is a memory that comes from the present. And a real today, because most of the impressions Keller has transferred into his pictorial cosmos since 2011 were experienced in Saxony. This is where he was born in Grimma, where he received his first artistic inspiration from a Leipzig painter at the age of 19, before he began studying at the Nuremberg Academy. Much more formative was his time at the Dresden Art Academy. "That's where we painted," says Keller succinctly. He finished his studies in Leipzig. Now, one could easily refer to the figurative tradition that lived on after the end of the GDR or use one of the meaningless labels such as the "New Leipzig School". But that does not get to the heart of Keller's art. He does not deal with either "Dresden" or "Leipzig" currents in a formative way, even though interiors and architecture are often found there. Keller's rapturous brushstrokes, the auratic use of colour, the implied and shadowy quality, all this can just as easily be compared with the Belgian Luc Tuymans, to name but one example. And a work like Keller's "Schönbach", which shows nothing but a white-cubic building on thin pillars à la Corbusier against a southern glowing sky, could also be spontaneously attributed to a Californian artist. Yet the inspiration goes back to a kitchen studio on a Saxon motorway. But localisable details - even where they actually exist - are not essential in Keller's work. He transfers his visual memories into a painterly fiction, set in a placeless sphere full of moods and feelings. Even if the visual fund has a lot to do with Saxony and some with the legacy of the GDR, in method it is not "East German" painting (32 years after the fall of the Wall, this categorisation should be thrown on the dustbin of history anyway). It is a painting of today.

Selected Group and Solo Exhibitions

Selected Public Collections

• Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn
• Städtische Galerie Dresden
• Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen
• Galerie Neue Meister der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden
• Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden
• PPZK Deutschland
• Kunstsammlung der Roland-Graefe-Stiftung

Selected Bibliography

• Galerie Poll (Hrsg.): Eric Keller – Nachsaison; Berlin; 2021
• Eva und Lothar C. Poll (Hrsg.): Keine Bilder ohne Liebe; Druckerei Conrad; Berlin; 2012; ISBN: 978-3-931759-32-2
• Galerie Irrgang GbR Leipzig/Berlin (Hrsg.): Eric Keller – Freizeittreff Fortschritt; Leipzig 2012
• Diplomkatalog, HfBK Dresden, 2014
• Torsten Klaus: Ödnis und Fülle; in Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 16.10.2014
• Katja Lindenau: Die Wärme des November; in SAX 10/14, S. 27
• Liane Wendt: Auf der Suche nach der inneren Ruhe – Eric Keller; in kunnst Sommer 2016, S. 14 bis 21
• Wilhelm Werthern: Eric Keller – Künstler des Monats; in LE MONDE diplomatique, Deutsche Ausgabe, Mai 2016
• Kulturkreis Sulzfeld/Galerie Leuenroth (Hrsg.): Mitten im Mai; Lubok Verlag; Leipzig 2017; ISBN: 978-3-945111-36-9
• Karl Kowalke (Hrsg.): Liebelei; Dresden 2017
• Patrick-Daniel Baer: Rupfen in fremden Gärten – Eric Keller und Michael Klipphahn; www.cybersax.de
• Patrick-Daniel Baer: Der Laptop, der auf einer Bank sitzt; in Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 28.05.2018
• Christiane Meixner: Urbane Romantik – Eric Keller in der Galerie Poll; in Tagesspiegel, 23.07.2018
• Eva und Lothar C. Poll (Hrsg.): Abenteuer Kunst – 50 Jahre Galerie Poll; Katalogdruck-Berlin; Berlin; 2018; ISBN: 978-3-931-759-40-7
• Annette Schröter (Hrsg.): KONVOI – Annette Schröter und Meisterklasse; Pöge Druck, Leipzig 2018
• Patrick-Daniel Baer: Der Heimat-Hirsch; in Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 28.03.2019
• Patrick-Daniel Baer: Interference; in SAX, November 2019
• Patrick-Daniel Baer: Hybride Verbindung; in DNN, 21.11.2019
• Echo Licht, Ausgabe 2: Über das Feiern, Kulturheldenradio, 2020
• Berliner Abendschau, rbb, 31.10.2020
• Bund Bildender Künstler Leipzig e.V. (Hrsg.): Ereignis Malerei 2020, Leipzig 2020
• Julia Christian: State of the Art oder Kunstkränzchen – Oskar Rink im Gespräch mit Eric Keller; in Stadtluft Dresden, Bookzin 5, S. 60-63, Dresden 2020, ISBN 978-3-86530-264-9