The motto which Friedrich Nietzsche once inscribed on the title page of his “Gay Science” could easily be set above the entrance to Kodritsch’s workshop:
“Ich wohne in meinem eignen Haus,
Hab Niemandem nie nichts nachgemacht
Und – lachte noch jeden Meister aus,
Der nicht sich selber ausgelacht.”
“I stay to mine own house confined,
Nor graft my wits on alien stock :
And mock at every master mind
That never at itself could mock.”
Nietzsche’s aphorisms are a parody of the seriousness behind major scientific and philosophical theories. The triple negation in the second line of the original text (“Hab Niemandem nie nichts nachgemacht”) indicates the strong likelihood that Nietzsche drew on the works or others for his own ideas. It says that it no longer possible to create anything that is original, unique or completely new in an autochthonous sense. And it says that each “master mind” – of whom there are more enough in the world of contemporary art – who asserts this without laughing at himself should himself be laughed at. Here speaks the self-aware and self-reflexive voice of irony, one which makes no concessions to the individual person or to the individual’s work.
The use of irony is an essential characteristic in Kodritsch’s work. He reflects on and criticises the opportunities which painting offers. At the same time he views the history of painting as a whole. In many cases his own art is a reflection on the potentiality of the medium. Here he has no illusions. Instead, he uses humour and irony to point to and overcome the inabilities and limitations of painting as a medium: it cannot always deliver what people expect of it. Particularly in his more recent works Koditsch has made highly intuitive use of his brush and emphasised the abstract quality of his painting. Yet he never leaves these gestural strokes, streaks and feral Zumalungen, or total over-paintings, to stand autonomously by themselves. Instead, they emerge from the abstract surface of the painting with various fragments of reality and the set pieces he provides from his visual vocabulary. Here he candidly uses the repertoire of images and forms that art and culture have produced throughout their history as well as popular and everyday culture. They are the source and inspiration behind many of his works. Instead of trying to disguise it, Kodritsch fully embraces the realisation that an element of the banal and trivial is present in each of his works. The result – a combination of intuitive brushstrokes and the irony and kitsch present in his visual content – has become his trademark style of painting. That is not to say his art exhausts itself in superficial visual jokes, for what appears obvious reveals a complex network of relationships; what appears ostensible opens our eyes to the unfathomable in our society; and what appears to defy meaning resists the supposedly meaningful. Here, irony and mockery oppose the conventions of the powerful.
The ability to have a laugh at oneself and at one’s own art in the sense of Nietzsche’s call for self-irony is immediately evident in several of Kodritsch’s works. In his series of photographs entitled Maler und Modell (“Painter and Model”, 2002) he not only picks up on a traditional subject of art history but also plays with the image of the artist, of the celebrated star who pops up at one glossy international jet set event after the other with his photogenic girlfriend Kate Moss. Evidently, the intentionally ham-fisted collage of supposed snapshots depicting the dream duo is an ironic take on a cult which idolises the artist as a star and elevates him to pseudo-celebrity status. The Selbstporträt als geiler gelber Frosch (“Self-portrait as a randy yellow frog”, 2005) which requires no further explanation and the I’m getting old series (2009), in which the artist portrays himself as a restless mind with a long beard, offer further evidence of relaxed self-deprecation. He candidly admits to his failures – Schon wieder gescheitert beim Versuch, einen Regenbogen zu malen (“Another abortive attempt to paint a rainbow”, 2011) and seals crumpled up drawings which have not received his final approval in an untitled plexiglass cube 234. He puts his failures on public display. At the same time he transforms the primary geometric corpus of minimalist art trends in the last century into a receptacle for residual art. © Roman Grabner
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