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Traces of our time
The pictures of Klaus Wendel, who died unexpectedly in 2005, deserve to be kept from oblivion. They represent the attempt of painting in a time of transition, when the belief in technical progress turned into pessimism and fears of the future, as landscape became more and more torn and distorted. At first sight, the motives reside between a fascination for engineering achievements and impotent paralysis against the brutality of destruction, but both moments are balanced, because time itself is contradictory. The third motif, bizarre formations, not made by humans, seems like a counterpoint to technology, like a memory of home. But even these are not represented naturalistically, but dissolved into structures of the smallest forms and colors, technicized. The bright aerosol strip remains offset above the horizon. There is no way back to the idyll of nature. Painting can express this better than language.
