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Visual Poetry or From Photography to Painting
For connoisseurs of Lars Ulrich Schnackenberg's art, the artist's intent is not tied to a specific style but is instead a continuous exploration of the visual possibilities of living in our world. Schnackenberg fundamentally poses existential questions, seeking to answer them with realistic means. In Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, it is stated: "Where there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility."
Schnackenberg is deeply aware of this inquiry and its accompanying philosophical implications. He understands that directly depicting reality through photography cannot provide answers to life's questions. Although he uses photography as a medium, he combines various images into one. These are then reworked with the encaustic technique, creating emulsions on the surfaces of the images. The viewer can recognize much within these works while also being prompted to ask continuous questions of the images.
The artist actively involves the viewer in these inquiries, following Umberto Eco’s concept of the opera aperta, the open artwork that reveals itself differently to each observer, as they bring unique, highly personal connotations to the image. Schnackenberg plays with this openness. Each of his works resists the contemporary "simplification" of the world (as described by Thomas Bauer). For Schnackenberg, art represents richness, not impoverishment; freedom, not merely visual confirmation of the optical accuracy of a socio-cultural thesis.
The young Schnackenberg learned to think in spatial terms while studying sculpture with the abstract artist Bernhard Heiliger in Berlin. This third dimension grew from spatial identity into a realm of profound intellectual spaces. His turn toward painting, perhaps influenced by his professorship at the Alanus University for Art and Society in Alfter, eventually led to the use of photography as a new medium. Through his unique processing methods, photography was returned to painting—a fascinating process in the history of both disciplines.
"Summertime – Where have all the flowers gone?" (Art Space Bad Honnef) in 2023 marked the latest exhibition in a series that began in 1996 with a photo installation at Bonn's Auermühle. Using slide projections onto the bricked-up window recesses of storage and work halls, the artist examined the visual narratives of a concrete floor. This work explored the localization of unwritten history as a subjective experience in the medium of light. Subsequent exhibitions included Kleine Geschichten, virtuelle Geschichten (Small Stories, Virtual Stories, Gallery ACHT P&Q, Bonn, 1997), Momente (Moments, Gallery ACHT P, Bonn, 2004), Wisse das Bild (Know the Image, Art Association Linz am Rhein, 2013), Wir (We, Art Space Bad Honnef, 2020), ?!TRUTH!? (Art Association Linz am Rhein, 2022), and WIR und WIR (WE and WE, Art Association Aichach, 2023).
The exhibition titles themselves link the artworks to a linguistic worldview, which could have philosophical origins, from Heidegger to Sartre, and they complement the visual language in its quest for life’s impacts through previously unseen thought directions in painting. The images remain images, needing no textual documentation as they transform altered depictions.
Schnackenberg cherishes sensuality and the sensuous in his quest for life. He is neither a minimalist, an abstract painter, nor a conceptual artist, but a self-responsible seeker, aiming to find new answers through images.
Later, Schnackenberg came to recognize, influenced by the rise of Second Life, the perceptual and interpretive differences among viewers. These new inquiries into perception as an absolute led to the narrative small stories and virtual stories showcased in the exhibition WIR und WIR.
The focus of Schnackenberg’s work lies in understanding the essence of humanity through art—a search without end. This endeavor arises from the awareness that images emerge as ideal constructs, or from a significant or coincidental impetus, translated into painting.
The colors of his depicted content remain unrestricted. Schnackenberg adheres to no binding manifesto of realism in representational art. The freedom of thought guarantees each image, each cycle of images, the liberty of interpretation. The images become documents reflecting perceived places of experience and situations of life.
However, the tension is not merely thematic. For decades, our view of photography has been shaped by questions of realism. Therefore, Schnackenberg’s reworking of photographs—created digitally and printed—expands visual options by transforming them into encaustic paintings. This is an artistic decision-making process that re-emphasizes craftsmanship in art.
The artist often references his age, his many decades of experience as an artist, and his fondness for La vita come commedia dell'arte.
Even this reference to Dante demonstrates how centuries converge in every work and how each piece simultaneously looks toward the future. Schnackenberg does not present historical painting but an autonomous cosmos of free art, defined by the works themselves, and paving the way toward the future through them.
Viewers recognize worlds of thought from their own lives, perceive expressions of their own existence, as Schnackenberg highlights existential life moments—impressions, memories, feelings, premonitions, and, following Martin Seidel’s reflections, privacy and public life. Therefore, Schnackenberg does not solely rely on his own photographs but draws from all areas, ensuring they merge within the artwork through the lens of the artist.
In connection with these images, we speak of unstable equilibriums, moments, virtual histories, the call to know the image, or art as an invitation. Home and death, transience, horror, melancholy, longing, and sometimes laughter form the core of his reflections. Relationships between men and women are explored, as well as the connection to nature, particularly the mountainous landscapes of Berchtesgaden, where the artist grew up. Visual poetry has reinvented itself.
Professor Dr. Dieter Ronte
Director of the Bonn Art Museum
Bonn, July 2024
Life is an open work…
The "Schnackenberg Cosmos" is populated by current events, historical components, personal experiences, and the ever-searching gaze upon a world of objects, symbols, and words that the artist’s wandering mind selectively gathers and reassembles into ever-new creations.
For many years, Lars Ulrich Schnackenberg has explored humanity and its integration into the world and society through his unique series of works. Employing a hybrid of painting and photography, he has developed a distinct artistic approach that allows him to transform images into painterly statements through overlays and reworkings with a variety of techniques. These image collages reflect life’s situations. Schnackenberg emerges as an artist deeply rooted in everyday concerns and politically engaged, commenting on recent world events and themes from world history. His compositions present a world as it unfolds before our eyes daily—interconnected, overlaid, and layered with complexities that sometimes obscure clarity.
In his dedicated artistic journey, Schnackenberg has illuminated human existence through experimental photographic and drawing series, capturing it in strikingly unexpected images. In our visually and digitally driven culture, often described as a "visual culture," engaging with his works is worthwhile. They are as expressive as they are fragile, frequently unsettling—not only because of their vivid aesthetic but also due to the provocative nature of their subjects.
The artistic domain Schnackenberg operates in is difficult to define. While he utilizes photography as a stylistic tool, he is not confined to the realm of the photographer. Strictly speaking, he is a draftsman and painter, whose output results in image objects—constructed picture-sculptures—that focus on moments, time, and humanity.
His series of works often resemble palimpsests. In art history, a palimpsest refers to multi-layered murals—or originally, parchment written over and repurposed—where successive layers accumulate, and previous ones are partially erased or revealed. Schnackenberg’s constructed image objects do not emerge as a process unfolding over time but under the concept of simultaneity, with the premise of original, artistic design.
It may seem as though Schnackenberg’s images arise from randomness, as each is an assemblage of content and thought layered one upon another. As if the image continually evolves in its expression, forms, colors, lines, and content coalesce into an inseparable texture that develops incrementally in what appears to be a painterly process. These works draw on the artist’s boundless imagination and his wealth of associative stories, which serve as the foundation for his compositions and depictions. Once completed, the rhythm of their creation is inscrutable; viewers can only guess at fragments and rely on their own interpretations to decode the new reality created by the dense layering of forms and structures. This may well be one of Schnackenberg’s core messages: that everyone, in engaging with the world and existence, is ultimately on their own. The artist avoids determinism, instead granting interpretive sovereignty to all in equal measure. His images are not photographic documentation but frozen moments of memory, a fixation of the lost, and a visualization of the unseen.
The resulting images convey no mere surfaces or external realities. Instead, they condense into seismographic depictions of inner worlds.
Nearly all the technical means Schnackenberg employs create space without illusion. The layers contradict one another, in the interplay of concealment and revelation, suggestion and withdrawal. In these superimpositions, where the various planes are indistinguishable and fused, forgetting, memory, and immersion occur. The depth of the layering becomes an analogue for subjectivity. His image objects stand as metaphors for the enigmatic existence of the world.
Recognizable elements from newspapers or magazines merge into semi-transparent wholes in Schnackenberg’s work, where he builds layer upon layer of history and form. As his compositions progress, they gain both density and transparency. Viewers are drawn into the layers of foreground and background, searching for structures and forms to decipher and understand. Their gaze repeatedly shifts from the surface to the depths, engaging with the mysteries embedded within. The advent of digital image processing introduced additional facets and layers to his work. Yet these remain technical enhancements; the original idea and intensity of his explorations, transformations, and reexaminations persist, culminating in photography. Since 2002, all but the final stages of his work have taken place in the digital realm. The finishing touches, however, involve ancient techniques. After numerous experiments with waxes, glues, and oils, Schnackenberg continues to conclude his works using encaustic methods. The final layer and surface of the image is wax—tactile, fragile, and serving as a protective space for the world within.
Schnackenberg’s images, meticulously constructed like an architect’s blueprint, lack the effortless smoothness often found in works born of a single moment’s inspiration. Instead, the layering process imbues them with relief-like textures that render the surface almost tangibly graspable. The effort, force, and sometimes even torment with which the painter shapes his works leave visible traces that can be felt and seen.
Schnackenberg’s catalog showcases his approach through four groups: Existential, Narrative Landscapes, Summertime, and La vita come commedia dell’arte. His themes consistently engage with humanity’s core issues—powerlessness, mortality, and the hope for a life free of war and violence. Even in his landscapes and floral depictions, seemingly neutral and filled with earthly aesthetics, the harmony is questioned by underlying threats and subtitles like "Where have all the flowers gone?" These images can be disquieting, yet they invite fresh viewing, contemplation, and experience. Schnackenberg compels his audience to confront ideas, thoughts, and themselves. He is a paraphrasing artist, tirelessly engaging with the world as he constructs his images.
Schnackenberg’s art provokes reflection—just as it reflects his own contemplations during its creation, rooted in the experience of everyday life and the broader world. Always critical, ironic, and tinged with sentimentality.
Schnackenberg’s art brings joy—revealing our flaws with a wry smile and allowing us to see ourselves.
Schnackenberg’s art has purpose—imbued with his philosophy of understanding, peace, and the belief that humanity, capable of better, must strive to be better.
Gabriele Uelsberg
Lars Ulrich Schnackenberg – Life is an open work
Rarely does one encounter an artist who, over more than twenty years, remains so committed to his specific medium and visual language—indeed, so at home within it—as Lars Ulrich Schnackenberg.
Schnackenberg’s works are not classical photography, though this technique serves as their foundation. Initially analog, and for many years now digital, the artist photographs both the real and the mediated world. In the latter, this might include newspaper images, which Schnackenberg photographs and repurposes. Iconic snapshots of historical moments, etched into the collective memory—such as Willy Brandt’s solemn kneeling during his visit to the memorial of the former Warsaw Ghetto in Wegen der Menschen da—frequently feature. Or, perhaps, stills from live broadcasts of Alpine landscapes, whose mountain vistas, captured fleetingly as they flicker across the screen, translate the digital raster into ornamental structures. A defining trait of all these photographs is that Schnackenberg processes them digitally. In a painstaking process, images are layered into collage-like compositions, rethought, distorted, and transformed. The resulting complexity makes his works strikingly relevant in today’s media-saturated, fast-paced visual culture. Once printed as fine art canvases, they are painted over using encaustic techniques.
The term encaustic stems from the ancient Greek word for burning in, and it describes a technique used since antiquity. Pigments suspended in a blend of wax, glue, and oils are applied hot onto the substrate—in this case, the printed canvas. Not only does this technique dramatically enhance the brilliance of the underlying colors, but the encaustic also acts as a protective layer, preserving the image’s content. Unlike varnish—an almost invisible, faintly glossy coating used for oil or acrylic paintings—encaustic is tactile, tangible. It reveals the artist’s hand, tracing the path of the hot iron across the canvas. Thus, it is not merely a protective veil but also a bridge between the image and the world from which it emerges.
Schnackenberg’s choice of motifs is never arbitrary. His works draw on images that move him, compelling him to transpose them onto canvas. Themes from current events are intricately tied to human existence in the world. Consequently, his works resemble meticulously annotated diary entries, revisited repeatedly by their author—an image added here, a phrase overwritten there—all infused with the artist’s emotions. These pieces are deeply personal yet simultaneously universal, reflecting on humanity and the society we inhabit. As a result, they convey not only joy and happiness but also melancholy and pain.
Over the last twenty years, Schnackenberg’s works have coalesced into a visual cycle, a narrative divided into four chapters: Existenziell, Narrative Landschaft, Summertime, and La vita come comedia dell’arte. However, the overarching title of his retrospective at the Roentgen Museum Neuwied indicates that his oeuvre makes no claim to completion: Life is an open work. With this title, Schnackenberg reserves the option to continue his work—like a diary—because, for him, it is a necessity to reflect on the events that move him.
Often inspired by images from the media, Schnackenberg’s works invite reflection on depicted events at a meta-level. Other pieces, however, are drawn from lived moments, offering viewers intimate glimpses into the artist’s emotional landscape. An example is the triptych Rheinisches Fest. Like a dream, dancing couples flit past the viewer in shadowy outlines—blurred, dynamic, and almost intoxicating. Here and there, carnival caps emerge from the dense layering of images, reinforcing the associations with the Rhineland Carnival hinted at by the triptych’s title. Simultaneously, they lend the scene an ironic undertone, evoking the phrase "making a fool of oneself." Schnackenberg plays here with the precarious boundary between carefree revelry and escalation.
For the series Summertime, Schnackenberg ventured outdoors with his camera. "To photograph flowers—to work on something light and cheerful after all the heavy topics," he explains. Yet, even here, it becomes clear that the artist avoids superficiality. Perhaps it is second nature to Schnackenberg to seek depth in the ostensibly beautiful. He recounts how he found no flowers in nature—not in the direct surroundings of his studio in Unkel by the Rhine. Flowers appeared only in balcony boxes, front gardens, and public flowerbeds, but not in the wild. The series is subtitled Where have all the flowers gone?, a nod to Pete Seeger’s melancholic 1955 folk song. The blossoms that grace the Summertime images, then, are not wildflowers. On closer inspection, the dreamy, layered petals reveal shelves, grids, and metal frameworks. These are no wild blooms but flowers confined in racks, mass-produced for sale in garden centers.
Here, Schnackenberg’s profound philosophy emerges once again: freedom versus oppression. This universal dichotomy extends far beyond flowers to other realms of life.
This is precisely the approach Schnackenberg hopes for from his audience: to look closely, to engage deeply with his art. His works are not consumable art; they are ill-suited for casual glances. Their aesthetic is subtle yet, once discovered, incredibly powerful. Messages and stories are fragmented within their multilayered depths. Titles provide only small clues to the images’ narratives, serving as starting points for the viewer to delve into the works, deciphering their meanings. If we rise to the challenge, engaging with Schnackenberg’s art, ourselves, and society, we are richly rewarded with lasting insights.
Jennifer Stein, M.A.
Virtual stories or about the moments
In literature, moments of thought play a significant role, exemplified by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who articulated his flashes of insight into aphorisms. However, in medieval craft workshops, moments didn't hold significance. Artists were bound by defined commissions, foreseeing the outcome. The creation of works was a long strategy, destined for eternity, such as for ritual use. Yet, history swiftly disrupted the traditional, introducing new ideas. In visual arts, the momentary and the accidental gained prominence only in the 20th century.
Spontaneity became valued, allowing artists to express themselves immediately and unadulteratedly. The speed of creating a painting acquired a unique quality. Artists experienced "Sternstunden" in Tachism and German Informel, creating works in minutes on specific dates, emphasizing speed, even for recipients.
Lars-Ulrich Schnackenberg narrates moments, calling them virtual stories. His strategy isn't solely about the speed of creation but combines a desire for representation with realistic characteristics, reporting on the chance events. He doesn't introduce something new in the sense of abstraction as a new reality; rather, he constructs his own visual realities, accountable to these moments as virtual stories.
Paradoxically, these virtual stories, these moments, are actual experiences. Schnackenberg reports on himself in his pictures, his experiences, everyday peculiarities, intense lived moments, or those visually experienced, through media, television, friends, personal actions, family, social and economic situations, and the studio. These experienced situations become triggers.
The titles of the representations align with this concept. For instance, sitting in a beer garden by the Rhine, and someone says, "My brother, my sister lives in Baghdad," precisely on the day Baghdad is bombed, the world becomes different, peculiar. These moments, stemming from chance occurrences reporting a larger order and becoming objective experiences for individuals, often seem random and incidental to others. Schnackenberg reports these subjective objectivities.
Whether it's the moments of Rückert's Kindertotenlieder set to music by Mahler, Schnackenberg, as an artist, becomes detached from the world to bear witness. He leads himself in the work "Ulis," processes portraits, distorts, utilizes new media, computers, scanners, and printers to showcase a different visual reality.
Behind all these actions is a significant and sincere attempt to locate and position oneself. The artist is perpetually in search of themselves, not others, not in pursuit of representing others' desires. Schnackenberg navigates between themes, understanding he isn't a niche saint and doesn't seek niche support. He moves socially, freely, and upright in society, like Giovanni da Bologna's figura serpentinata.
He doesn't conceal but publishes; he doesn't deny but points out; he doesn't lie but seeks truth, understanding the strong artistic context needed. The artist enjoys narrating small stories, where these moments shine like flashes. This literary element, not textually bound for illustration but developed as an optical aphorism, expands vision through cycles and repetition, presenting a constantly changing representation as if the metamorphosis of the found is the true goal of representation.
Even in challenging times, a symbiotic relationship develops, transforming landscapes into visuals, faces into abstract landscapes, forming anonymities, even reaching baconesque statements with portraits with dogs. The portrait of a person, their sacred image, becomes increasingly encoded. Moments of personal experience are recounted, evolving into stories or large-scale representations, heightening the narratable by operating with redundant images. The viewer, facing the image anew, is led through repetitions, fostering a dialogic nature with repeated viewings.
"In brief, Schnackenberg's stories and moments, his virtual visual narratives, can be described as: Virtual objectivity without mimesis despite significant realism, understood as a critical method. These narratives delve into experiences and observations, capturing the essence of fleeting moments and transforming them into visual representations that challenge traditional artistic norms."
Bonn, November 2003
Professor Dr. Dieter Ronte ist Direktor des Kunstmuseums Bonn.
Gerhard van der Grinten: Moments
If I am fantasy, I am also flesh. Am I less real than my own anguish? Whether my feelings be false or true, how can I say till I see what I do? What is a unicorn? And is that I? I am the unicorn. But who I am?
Robert Broughton: When do we recognize ourselves? And when do others appear as unique beings, unmistakable? The essence through the individual features that set it apart from all the others—yet, aren't there cultures where the individual means nothing, and the community means everything? The individuals there would, therefore, be no less unique. We see the features once. And we must recall them in comparison to all others we saw, to present them as those unique entities, to distinguish them. People whose one hemisphere of the brain had been injured sometimes lose not the ability to perceive the eye, nose, ears, chin, and mouth. But rather, to assemble them into a person. The Other, as familiar as they might be, remains foreign to them. They now recognize them more by the voice. Distance also creates a gap: beyond eight hundred meters, we are no longer able to identify others. A little closer, and shape and gesture are enough, even if the face is just a tiny spot. This mimicry, features, glances define us to the counterpart, whether favorably or unfavorably. Deformation terrifies us because it always reminds us of the fear of losing our own face, where features derail, become erased. More unsettling: to experience our own photographic countenance or that of another half-reflected, uniting just two left or right halves into a new face that reveals character traits one would prefer to protect or conceal. And how assured are we, able to derive from an old figure, whether it had a living model or if its story were merely the superficial imitation of a general ideal countenance: so intensely personal the presence of much of ancient Egyptian sculpture, like affect-deprived masks of the heads of classical Greece, so diverse much of the medieval, almost physically palpable presence of the Naumburg donor figures. It seems one can capture the essence of a person sometimes by alienating their characteristics and even exaggerating them. Today, one can clone them. The old dream of the homunculus is shattered, the sleeper is awakened and breeds eagerly; although artists have always created figures in their own image, the consequences were never more catastrophic than they are now. In the fantasies of utopian novels, in Hollywood's moving pictures, there abound modern Prometheans, duplicated beings, virtual goddesses, creatures that, according to all daily experience, are entirely impossible, yet could convincingly exist. The question of what is individually conceivable is now emerging anew. Indigenous peoples still have horror at becoming counterfeits, as if making an image would mean gaining power over that soul. How might they react to the idea that it is possible to generate one's own living likeness? If the individual ceased to be individual, would the portrait be the mass of the same? Against this backdrop, not born in an ivory tower but with eyes for the surrounding world and its voyages, Ulrich Schnackenberg's figure paintings arise, which are portrait-like, seen mostly based on identifiable images, illustrations - and their sublimation. If the individuals present are still in the shadowy shade, in the rasterized coarse grain of the print, in the reformatting that stretches and compresses the figures like a funhouse mirror, entirely according to the taste and pictorial necessity. If they take on mis-colorations, this too is a loss of durable reality, brought into unexpected assemblies and conjunctions, or doubled and multiplied into groups: then, the ever-same girl's face, sometimes turned to the left, sometimes to the right - and how much character change does this reflection seem to bring to all! - each time almost different, new, and unique. Blends occur, where the viewer's eye can no longer determine which contour, whose silhouette is the actual one, which is a kind of dark astral body. Don't we all combine different possibilities, essences within us?
Another aspect revealed by the titles themselves: "Kindertotenlieder," didn't they already appear as haunted to us before? Others lift individuals out of the masses as if they were lost in them. Faces of idols, heathens of mass culture, notorious, omnipresent in their images, have become vulnerable in their recognizability. A stout man with a dog. The artist himself, absent, present but in the streets of his hometown. Even the portrait in times of its endangerment. Adequate to the passage of time, he employs the latest technological advancements: computers and printers, scanners and optical printers, feeding in what can be found in images in the meshes of the world-encompassing network, assembling, adding, creating hybrids, chimeras, interferences that would otherwise be scarcely achievable. Yet afterward, covering them with the patina and materiality of waxes, so that they might not be fleeting but tangible. Credible. So that we might recognize ourselves in them...
Gerhard van der Grinten, 14. 12.2003. Gerhard van der Grinten, Esq., is a painter, graphic artist, and publicist.
Unstable Equilibriums
"Short Stories" - Schnackenberg's new works are a surprise in their intimacy and privacy, and a small revelation in their artistic approach. Despite the title "Short Stories," what Schnackenberg presents in these elaborately digitally processed images, assembled from various image materials and coated with colored waxes, are not really coherent stories. They are actually "Messages to Friends," reflections carried by moods and emotions, diary-like confessions, fleeting notes, pictorial reminiscences, and intuitions that Schnackenberg has condensed into symbols of high poetic conciseness from a personal perspective and personal involvement.
The paintings primarily deal with love, homeland, and death. Death appears multiple times: as the catastrophic death of September 11 but also as the lonely death of a man lying flat under a clothesline.
Love and the longing for it are the main themes of these scenes. Encounters and "attempted closeness" occur between man and woman, but more frequently there are failures, detachments, ruptures. A woman of advanced age reappears as a leitmotif on several panels; she is a woman, lover, mother, rival, and abandoned: a symbol of transience, missed opportunity, and farewell.
Death is inevitable, encounters are fleeting, only the nature of the mountain world, which points to Schnackenberg's Berchtesgaden heritage, remains constant. Yet, almost always, the scenes characterized by horror, melancholy, and longing, sometimes even by laughter, revolve around unstable equilibriums.
Schnackenberg's paintings are not discursive treatises; they are visual poems. The themes interlock, impressions blend with other impressions, with memories, emotions, intuitions. To make this complexity of reality levels perceptible and to show how fragile perception is and how private the public and how public the private are, Schnackenberg brings together heterogeneous image material: older and new photos by him, postcards, and often photos he extracts from the daily newspaper.
If the form of montage is the adequate expression of the content, the singular visual brilliance also stems from Schnackenberg's original technique. He artistically processes the photos through an elaborate digital procedure on the computer. In another step, he coats the printed images with wax and goes further by applying the wax-coated handmade paper to canvas and reworking it with wax.
Ultimately, the medium, the artistic genre, does not play a decisive role when it comes to realizing ideas of "image today." Because whether photo, digital image, drawing, painting, or all together: what matters are good images, images that delve deep, emerge from peeling and layering, and thus convey a complex foresight. This is precisely what Schnackenberg's "Short Stories" do.
Martin Seidel Dr. Martin Seidel works as an independent art historian and publicist in Bonn.
Wisse das Bild
"Wisse das Bild" is the title of Lars Ulrich Schackenberg's latest project, presented in 2013 at the Kunstverein Linz am Rhein. The work from 2013 is a multipart cycle, mixed media as digital print on acrylic. It's structured so that all images are seen twice: once in the version treated by the artist and a second time mirrored through the window, captured by Thilo Beu's photography. This premise already promises an invitation to a deeper and comparative viewing. Indeed, the imperative character of these images is very strong, far removed from the artist's earlier works.
Additionally, the artist incorporates literary texts crucial for interpreting the images. The work is very complex. Friedrich Rückert's poem "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" rhymes the connection between the world and the individual, who has already wasted so much time with it—a hint at the artist's thinking, formulating his current position regarding society, his field of work, and, most importantly, in relation to himself. He has withdrawn from socio-political and utopian struggles, no longer reading socio-political books, art histories, or other scholarly dissertations; instead, he reads science fiction novels, searching for another world, embracing the truth of fairy tales because while they may not change realities, their truths can certainly influence the thoughts and feelings of individuals.
These works have emerged from this meditative path, now entering public discussion, necessitating not just the observer's participation but also their introspection. The cycle's title is found in Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Sonnets to Orpheus,' written in 1922 as a memorial for Wera Ouckama Knoop in Chateau de Muzot in the Swiss Rhône Valley. The ninth sonnet reads: "Even when the reflection in the pond/often blurs for us:/Know the image." With this guideline, Schnackenberg follows his image tracks, connecting them with the past of his previous pictures and exhibitions. An infinitely large reservoir of memories, both personal and stored in his computer files and treasures of television archives, serves him. For each personal memory, he finds the fitting image, manipulating it towards the right memory, now 'obscured' and slightly distorted by the reflection, starting a new dialogic life that, in the rational and emotional conversation of the two partners, elucidates the actual mental statements.
Rilke's subsequent text states: "Only in the realm of duality/do voices/become eternal and mild." This duality is always a representational event for artists not adhering to a rigid concept; it's the 'parallel action' of which Robert Musil speaks in 'The Man Without Qualities' in 1930. A parallel action to life, aiming to enable insights and changes as a legitimate guiding principle. It's the quest for the 'alter ego' as the most crucial conversation partner in life. But it also signifies a retreat to oneself. Today, we must learn to distinguish reality from virtual worlds; we, who no longer know who influences us more, reality or the virtual realities that undoubtedly influence younger generations more than older guardians, who have an obligation to make their children flexible and imaginative for the future.
The cycle speaks of this as well, the artist breaking out of his hoped-for fairy-tale world to take the forward-looking path, albeit without any pedagogical finger-pointing. The playful nature in dealing with the images always remains. "You can leave your hat on," sings Joe Cocker in a TV clip, also subjected to reflection. "The Rolling Stones' Worldview" shows how the fever for new music has conquered the world and the heart of the young visual artist. Each individual work with its reflection reveals the artist's thoughts, also integrating very early sketches by the searching artist into the new imagery, as in "Worldview Theater," where, as in "Worldview Vision," earlier representations are interwoven with today's. The cycle displays a progression, a chronological but illogical journey through life. Yet, the framework is set in a way that never allows an illustration to emerge, but rather maintains free play and allows stimulating imagination to act. The opening image titled after Rückert's first sentence, "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," unfolds a broad panorama of the journey through life. A figure with a coat hanging over their shoulders enters the picture from the left and right. Both are bordered by reflecting architecture, and in the middle, we see image fields with women's faces. Above this, a world of architecture and nature, of built and fleeting cloud formations, metaphorical indications of the artist's portrayal of our world, which, as "Worldview Extinction," can also reveal the fragility of female heads and blurred architectural relationships: the uncertainty of our self-built spaces. The first image is also the resumption and alteration of a work from 2003, "Virtual Stories 4," paper and wax on canvas, in five parts, where the individual motifs are much more realistically elaborated (L.-U.Schnackenberg: Moments, Gallery Acht P! Pravato, Bonn, 2004, Cat. P.21). With the world images, the artist also discusses his previous work and exhibitions as a work in progress. In this catalog, I write about "Realism as a Critical Method" (p. 6). Martin Seidel explains, "Schnackenberg's images are not discursive treatises; they are visual poems" (ibid., p. 26). The circumstances shift. Therefore, it is not surprising that in "Worldview Theater," the world map is not a Eurocentric representation but shows North and South America in the middle axis, accompanied by obscure, quirky airborne devices that carry something animalistic yet encourage travel into the realms of fantasy. The background of all world images is a world map, more or less visible, protruding forward as if from marbling, offering the viewer many additional orientation options through the possible assignment of places, countries, continents. It represents (know the image!), the image of places with their respective circumstances, through which the artist addresses the various questions of cultural context, societal, and political conditions.
The artist, who studied and taught sculpture, now no longer forms individual pieces but consistently continues his path, which began well over a decade and a half ago, into the media adventures. Visitors enter a truly multilayered world. The images are perfectly composed in montage technique after a long, searching process. They are arrangements that immediately captivate the viewer, especially as they see themselves in the reflective surfaces of the images, thus being immediately involved. The principle of reflection is an infinite realization that plays with the idea that an image determines and is determined by spaces, that an image can take in additional information through reflections, not just through reflections but also through the conversations it leads. An image is never finished but is only of high quality when it can initiate dialogues, of which the artist, before presenting the image to the public, can know nothing. Schnackenberg's images fulfill this charge through these extra-pictorial processes to a great extent. This demonstrates that the imperative character is an elemental part of the images, ultimately reflecting the artist himself.
Reflection always extends both space and perspective. It allows for a different distancing. In his philosophical contemplations on art in the Berlin Simmel Lectures, philosopher Dieter Henrich reflects on this distancing: "The distance built up through aesthetic contemplation is to be explained as a transformation of this world relationship." (D. Henrich, Essay on Art and Life, Edition Akzente, Munich 2001, p.211) and "The shift in perspective on the world and the ambivalence that can develop between several such perspectives always affects the subject as such. Its origin is withdrawn from it. And the significance of its life can only be revealed to it through a specific occupation of the interpretive space open to it." (ibid., p. 213). The method of critical realism automatically opens up a distance to what is presented, much like Bertolt Brecht's dialectical theater (1898 – 1950), involving the theatergoer in thought.
'Wisse das Bild' is in good company, yet it's so new and different because the artist, in a mental abstracting process, refrains from every illustrative character of his image findings. This pursuit of virtual life edges shows the "Delpasse Effect." The Delpasse Effect refers to neurological investigations into the incomprehensible, the theory of existence at the threshold of death. Schnackenberg does not narrate a scientific mapping of the world, its inventory, or surveying but rather a world where people, in their finiteness, must share reality with their dreams and fairy tales.
Dieter Ronte Bonn, June 2014