SEOUL.- For several years, night has fallen in Armin Boehm's paintings. The sun, albeit fading, was still shining around 2015, and images revealed themselves in the twilight. Since 2018, his skies have become even darker. Stars or the moon appear at times, but light comes almost exclusively from artificial sources: from lamps, neon signs, searchlights. It looks garish as if to capture a street or an interior being illuminated after an accident or a crime. Boehm’s light heightens the eeriness of the night.
Night paintings are a long-standing tradition in Western painting. The crucifixion of Jesus is often depicted at night, as most famously exemplified by the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald, in which the night embodies death and mourning. Representations of the apocalypse are also often nocturnal. They are illuminated by fire or comets - in religious paintings as well as in modern fantasies of doom. Especially in the period around the First World War, there was a steady stream of ominous nighttime compositions created by the likes of Ludwig Meidner, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann. In the previous century, however, it was the Romantics such as William Blake, Johann Heinrich Füssli and Caspar David Friedrich, who often set their scenes at night. For them, the night not only meant the end of the day and a great death, but also gave hope for a new day: the sun would eventually rise anew.
Armin Boehm is well versed in the different iconographies of the night. However, he does not stop at merely referencing them in his paintings, and instead develops them further. After all, he cannot help but perceive some developments in recent years as threatening, even as frightening, or perhaps even as apocalyptic. Isn't the social atmosphere becoming more and more aggressive? Isn't the pressure to position oneself politically and ideologically increasing? And aren't more and more people drifting towards extremism and radicalism? Isn't there a lot of hatred and anger pouring out both on social media and in the streets? Isn't there an unspoken war between the sexes, between man and nature, between large corporations and individual citizens, between generations, social classes, and ethnicities? On top of that, there are crises such as the pandemic that continue to darken the situation. All in all, the picture emerges from a present that is rather out of joint, and in which a total collapse could occur at any minute.
Armin Boehm repeatedly and concisely conveys this bleak diagnosis in his paintings – and by no means only in the motif of the night. Divisive topics such as Donald Trump, Pepe the Frog or rainbow flags appear and reflect today's agitated social climate; subjects from the world of comics or media suddenly appear just as real as people, as if all hierarchies have been thrown out the window. In addition, some of Boehm's characters are ecstatic and exhilarated, while others seem powerless, exhausted, downright apathetic. In other words, extremes reign here too. The figures, however, never seem to be in harmony with one another. They seem to live in different, incompatible realms, in spite of the shared pictorial space they occupy.
Most often, however, they are at odds with their own selves. They appear with several faces at the same time or at least with additional - and often deformed - mouths, eyes, noses, or tongues. The conventional physiognomic order is dissolved, making it impossible to discern whether the figures are elaborately and monstrously masked or are skinned and abused. But both testify to a state of emergency and escalation, whereby they must either extensively disguise themselves for their own protection or they have already fallen victim to external violence and are disfigured as a result. Boehm is not content with just painting his subjects. Instead, he also works with fabrics that he cuts out and glues onto the canvas, reinforcing the impression that the faces are plastically distorted.
Much like his tutor Jörg Immendorff, Armin Boehm proves to be a great contemporary diagnostician in his portrayal of society. In addition, there are interiors, still lifes and portraits that make up his body of work. But even these much quieter, intimate pictures are set mostly at night, or at least contain motifs that can be associated with it: cats that come alive at night, or curtains that provide cover as you drift off to sleep. Or something is reflected in a pane of glass against a nightly background. Some of the flowers have lost their color, and in any case, they are in vases. They have already been cut off and are dead. Tables have black tops, rooms appear empty.
It all adds up to a mood that does not seem outright dangerous but is sinister in a more timeless manner. Here, an existential dimension of nocturnal worlds takes form; the socio-political gloom that plagues Boehm is heightened and refined by motifs that are independent of it. It doesn't take away the horror of his contemporary diagnoses, but rather provides the opportunity to visualize and reflect on them from a different, less retrained perspective.
