It’s This Different Kind of Colorful

 

A sleepwalker, his arms widespread, balances on a rope. Adrian Mudder brought him out from

behind the indeterminately dark ground of his painting as a silhouette. When he furnishes the

little man’s daring undertaking with the laconic title

How Painting Is

(2014, p. 7)

, it quite simply sums up painting. Dancing stroke for stroke on the fine line of decision, the painter is always

underway in a universe of possibilities. In the Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst, a colorful mural

that Adrian Mudder literally etches out from below a layer of black chalk, applied to the wall in advance, seems like a blow-up in this situation. The public is fascinated by the artist’s aimlessly wandering, floral fantasy, by the opulence of the Painter’s Cinema, and at the

same time they sense the painter and drawer’s hope of finding that dreamy certainty in the

artistic process that in fairy-tales very suddenly leads the errant protagonists to a previously

unknown destination.

As if his universe was not already large enough, in late 2017

Adrian Mudder reserves a new one.

He downloads the free application Autodesk SketchBook onto his smartphone. Nothing special for artists, as there is hardly anyone among them that does not test the creative possibilities of

the digital world. But this obsessive drawer catches fire. After all, the classic sketchbook has

been his daily companion since college years. Using watercolor or gouache, but primarily

pencil, colored pencils, ballpoint pens, and chalk, he has always been drawing what he now refers to as nomadic notes

.

One and all on voluminous, yellowish-white paper, almost always in vertical formal, almost

always furnished recto with place and date. Many of them are still lifes: coffee pots, oranges,

flowers, pumpkins, sushi, fried eggs, cigarette butts, and grotesque derailments of all these

things. Similarly, there are landscapes and portraits, precise linear drawings or painterly

impressions, and then again enchanted scribbles, ornaments, figurations, and hybrids created

out of all of them. Some of these studies bespeak a more or less chameleon-like prowl on the

trail of venerable artist colleagues. These include Adriaen Brouwer or Edvard Munch as well as

Olav Christopher Jenssen, the artist’s former professor of painting at the Braunschweig

University of Art, or Norbert Schwontkowski and David Hockney.

Whereas the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han curses our digital end devices as mobile

labor camps, the passionate drawer Adrian Mudder quite unceremoniously discovers a

wonderfully portable little garden of paradise in SketchBook. Its appeal is obvious: drawing

any time, everywhere and quickly, without any resistance. While the Impressionists struggled

en plein air with their sheets fluttering in the wind, artists of classical modernism who sought

their motifs in cafés and bars, always adjusting at least a lamp and with their equipment ready,

the smartphone sketcher needs nothing of the sort. For the observer Adrian Mudder, his phone

becomes an ideal tool for what he refers to as

short-distance concentration trainin

g

. If he has

charged his device, it is even possible to draw under the covers, or in a night train, on more or

less illuminated streets, in cozy company, at parties, or gladly in places where other night owls

are underway with their terminal devices. Not least, those whose facesseem to be almost

sacredly illuminated by the reverberation of their mobile telephones frequently become his

motifs. In the darkness of night—at the same time liberated and snug—Adrian Mudder worksalong the fluid boundary between dream and reality. And if in view of one or the other sketch ​he feels like asking for feedback, in just seconds he can share a drawing with everyone else.

When in doubt, there is always the

plenum

. Above all for the artist, who is cool with questions

of original and authorship and appreciates a superficial view.

With his exhibition

Pictures from My Pocket

, Adrian Mudder presents a wealth of digital

drawings on tablets as well as sketches on photographic paper, and similarly drawings on paper

and paintings in various formats. In doing so, he takes the public along with him on his artistic

expedition, on a quest borne by the question of where and in which way his media- and motif-

based universes converge. Digital programs simulate traditional drawing instruments complete

with eraser, shadowing, hatching, and the like as if by magic; brush, paints, textures,

experimental spraying or scratching techniques and endlessly more are imitated, and yet

something else emerges. Even a line applied with dreamy certainty, whether with the finger or a

stylus, always has something painterly about it when it is done with a smartphone or a tablet.

Everything creates the impression as if it could at any moment emit into another such

immaterial plane or into a diffuse space. There is something unstable and at the same time

always radiant about lines and colors, and as far as the palette is concerned, under the

impression of the exhibition Pictures from My Pocket one of the visitors succinctly summed it

up in the visitors’ book:

It’s this different kind of colorful.

Blue, whose internal immensity has

become a topos in literature in art, plays an important role in Adrian Mudder’s different kind of

colorful. Blue as the color of brilliance and light as well as darkness. The artist turns it into the

font of his exhibition, and in doing so tills his field of experimentation: With a large-format

painted nightscape like

Open Air

(2019, p. 35)

or the small-format group

Mondscheinorchester

(2019, p. 82–84)

, he attempts to atmospherically transfer what he captured on preliminary

smartphone sketches. Wraithlike black shadows of figures dance against a deep violet-blue

ground, light reflexes and lanterns float in vagueness as fraying, atomized orange, yellow, or

white, recently also applied with an aerosol can.

When we speak of the traditional drawer capturing something on paper, indeed, capturing his

motif, the touchscreen gestures of typing, dragging, swiping, and scrolling dissolve this

language-related image. In German, there is

a new, fitting image in which resonates a curious blend of conclusive strength and antisepsis:

the drawer seizes the motif on his terminal. In turn—above all when he draws with his finger—

this is very unexpectedly reminiscent of those childhood days when every one of us, lost in

thought, loosely and fluently drew on a fogged-up pane of glass, basically an urscreen. The

painting

Kra

ž

iai

(2019, p. 30)

, a view through a window in Lithuania on a rainy day, radiates the

melancholy of days such as these. And it actually radiates the gray; the gray nuances of the

painting shine, which is due to streaky wet-in-wet oil painting. A masterfully executed window

painting that causes us to decelerate and pause in times in which the countless windows that

essentially influence our perception and our consciousness long since accompany us in our

pants pockets wherever we go.

Annett Reckert