Bonjour Total

“I seem to recognize your face
Haunting, familiar, yet I can’t seem to place it
Cannot find the candle of thought to light your name
Lifetimes are catching up with me”1
An encounter at a gas station leaves a lasting
impression.
The female gas station attendant at the night counter—en face—looks at me, her visà-vis,
bored and unimpressed. What is impressive, however, is her appearance: a pearl necklace
and pearl stud earrings; make-up, rouge, her eyebrows darkly filled in, fringy bangs, a deep
shade of mallow purple around her lips. The artist’s brushstrokes do not seem to have come
by chance. They almost amorously surround the contours of her face, each individual pearl,
and line her eyelids. Perhaps it was the impasto application of her blue eyeshadow that
ultimately inspired the nightwandering artist to paint the portrait. He also brings out the
luster of the glass of the service counter window with the same shade of blue. The only
clear view is through the pass-through. Only not deep. Because of the way Adrian Mudder
places the unconventionally stylish lady behind the glass—her arms hidden behind the
counter from the height of her chest downwards—she could just as well represent a bust.
Her unanimated, mask-like existence plays a part in this impression. And yet: meeting
again somehow brings joy.
“I just want to scream ‘Hello!’
My God it‘s been so long
Never dreamed you’d return
But now here you are, and here I am”2
The neon sign of the French gas station chain “Total” and the associated café “Bonjour”
fuse to become a penetrating lighting unit. It seems to shout for attention. Mudder applies a
layer of flat and opaque light yellow and white spray paint that takes up the upper third of
the painting, which is also placed over the motif as a light haze. Small pools of paint have
dried on the canvas and become the focal points of a source of light. He places the slightly
translucent red letters on top of that in oil, and highlights the radiant light with comic-booklike speed lines. In fact, the impression of a melancholy hangout romanticism is created.
After all, gas stations are true islands of light at night and they provide despite the clammy,
cold lighting atmosphere—temporary asylum and make for one or the other strange
encounter. In addition, they
satisfy consumption needs of any kind 24/7 What lends the whole thing something
grotesque and is reminiscent of ghost trains at small-town fairs are the exaggerated, thick
streaks on the counter window, which were subsequently applied to the painting.
“I changed by not changing at all
Small town predicts my fate
Perhaps that’s what no one wants to see”3
What do people want to see? What does painting even (still) have to offer our almost
unsatisfiable visual needs? It is those moments in everyday life that stumble into the surreal
that cause Adrian Mudder to pull out his smartphone. No, not to quickly take a picture of
the situation. But instead to make a quick sketch of it with the aid of his drawing app. A
possible springboard for a subsequent painterly examination in the studio. In his
multifaceted painting, makizushi variations also encounter smartphones lying around,
indoor plants encounter waddling bottles. Lately often framed by an artificial light
atmosphere. Gladly in dark colors with occasional eruptions into dazzling ones. Nighttime
scenes, still lifes, portraits; drawing, painting, complete with experimental wall and window
painting. That is the spectrum of a painter who once set forth from Delmenhorst and landed
in Leipzig. His work rarely bothers itself with formal or factual coherence. He unites
different styles of painting and drawing, contrasting colors, and seemingly visual
inconsistencies. By frequently combining Western art history, which he quotes here and
there, with the reality of an everyday moment, he touches on the complex, absurd, and
contradictors nature of the question of what contemporary painting can shed light on.
“Memories like fingerprints are slowly raising
Me you wouldn’t recall for I‘m not my former”4
In his more recent works, Mudder plays with the painterly impulses of digital drawing
tools. If he uses—quite simply—a freely accessible app on his smartphone instead of
special, technically sophisticated drawing pads, which have long since become
standard in the area of illustration, he hardly complicates the relationship to the classic
medium of painting. In view of the touchscreen, his curiosity and joy of
experimentation instead become a projection of his figurative painting. His pleasure in
material, in dabbing, spraying, scratching, wiping, or applying color, remains unquenched.
For Mudder, motifs are generated out of all of the corners of everyday life: friends, bars, the
city, festivals, table scenes, nature, people, animals, paths, buildings, light. At the same
time, they are as floating as juggling with the vocabulary of painting, including geometric
abstraction, magic realism, all the way to naive figuration.
When I again stand at the counter along with others, I imagine the paintings wouldactually
wear such an undaunted look with respect to my expectations in painting.Like this woman,
who seems to look at me at the same height, for whom I in fact have to bend down in order
to engage in a conversation with her. Before I actually try it out, I again hear Eddie
Vedder’s voice in the outro of the song “Elderly Woman behind the Counter in a Small
Town”, which became my ear worm when contemplating this painting: “Hearts and
thoughts they fade away... .” Because I cannot leave it at that, I prefer to bend over and say
“Hello there!”.

Aneta Palenga

1–4
Elderly Woman Behind The Counter
In A Small Town von Pearl Jam