CHAOS AND ABSOLUTE PERFECTION
Rosa Windt
At first glance, the oeuvre of Stephan Jäschke seems extremely heterogeneous.Both in terms of content and in his use of media, an inconsistency stands out in particular, expressed in a wide range of subjects, materials, and styles. Gestural painting and painting in the style of Pop Art, for instance, along with large-scale banners with text and photorealistic borrowings represent just a small sampling of Jäschke's exploration of painting. Even his installations, drawings, objects made of plastic or bronze, or a new ceramic series are characterized less by an aesthetic symbiosis than a mutual antithesis.With an attitude reminiscent of both the avant-garde of the twentieth century and a radical aesthetic rethinking as well as the so-called Junge Wilde, the "young wild ones," of the 1980s, Jäschke isn't interested in establishing a style that is recognizable and has market value; his aim with each series and individual object is to question collective viewing habits and art-historical references and to transpose them into their own aesthetic and ambivalent expressive form. Here, the series, as an opportunity for investigation and sequence, is of recurring importance and appears as a consistent method in almost every medium. While a new series of ceramic vessels, for instance, explores possibilities of aesthetic ruptures between function and dysfunction as well as the organic and the constructed, Jäschke's series "Frucht auf Kunstbuch" (Fruit on Art Catalogues) shows finely crafted paintings that correlatively create a moment of irritation via the presence of lemons, strawberries, or apples rendered in the picture. On the one hand, the selected and painted catalogue pages point to Jäschke's art historical references as well as to his recurring interest in the situational and everyday still life. In this respect, his approach can also be described as a mode of Gesamtkunstwerk something, a method, a medium comes into focus and is often transformed at great speed into a compressed series. As a result, a multifaceted simultaneity arises, similar to everyday seeing, which is not homogenous in itself but nevertheless calls up innumerable mutual references such as the painting of a garishly luminous lemon on Malevich's black square juxtaposed with a deep black, glittering relief of a skull or a CD gesturally painted on permeable nettle fabric and a stack of ceramic obiects in the same design but with completely different haptics and coloring. What at first glance appears as a chaotic juxtaposition, fans out into a precise analysis of art and life with obiects that stand on their own and in a community, so to speak, form a whole.