Casually removed, the golden shoes sit on the floor. Shiny stilettos, representative of a night spent dancing, a glittering party with friends or a lively evening with beats and sounds. "Boxing Hall" is the title of one of the largest pictures by the Munich-based painter Charlotte Eschenlohr. This pair of shoes takes up a significant part of the painting. They appear to have been shrugged off on the floor of a vast, almost empty studio-like room, which has been brought onto the canvas two-dimensionally and virtually abstractly with a few, spiritedly placed brushstrokes. "Put on your red shoes and dance the blues", from David Bowie’s 80s hit "Let’s Dance" could be ringing in one’s ears. Pars pro toto, the striking shoes stand for a self-confident, self-determined woman, maybe a femme fatale, but maybe also a Cinderella character, who became ecstatic during this boisterous night of dancing. In the painting, they act as a dedicated symbol of femininity, sexuality and convey a feeling of feminine dominance over the stronger sex. "With the weapons of a woman” – this familiar quotation applies to many women with a successful career. In his raucous crime caper "High Heels – The Weapons of a Woman" (1991), the Spanish film-maker Pedro Almodóvar already demonstrated how strong women self-confidently defend themselves in adverse situations.
High Heels - Cool Ladies: The female figure takes center stage in the paintings of Charlotte Eschenlohr. In the last few years, while studying in New York, Salzburg and Berlin, she preferred to work with female nude models. At times, she lets these young women pose in an armchair so deep in thought as to be oblivious to all around, another time, they stride down a staircase, almost as you would expect, and other times again, she places them onto a Brooklyn roof-terrace with a fabulous view of the imposing Manhattan skyline. Eschenlohr’s women appear natural. In a relaxed manner, they seem to be deeply rooted in their surrounding world. Their nakedness seems almost a matter of course. They hold their own in their home environment as well as in their social milieu or in the noisy chaos of the metropolis. If they do despair once in a while, they react with defiance and sovereignty. They keep their composure. Over time, they have acquired a strong backbone.
Strong women take up a permanent position both in art history and the history of literature. The Brooklyn resident writer Siri Hustvedt in her artists’ novel published in 2003, “What I loved”, recounts the story of two families linked by fate, who are active in the New York art scene between 1975 and today. During endless conversations and debates between the unconventional protagonists on the subject of art and works of art, the discussion at one point also centers on the work and the observer. There it reads: “But the space taken up by the observer also belongs to the painter. The observer stands in the same place as the painter and looks at a self-portrait; but what he or she sees is not the picture of the man who signed the painting on the bottom right but that of someone else – a woman.” Reading on: "To look at women in paintings is an old familiar erotic convention, which principally turns every observer into a man dreaming of sexual conquest. Numerous important men have painted pictures of women that stimulate the imagination – Giorgione, Rubens, Vermeer, Manet – but as far as I know, not a single male painter has ever told the observer that they themselves are the woman." Erica, the woman of the first-person narrator, the art historian Leo Hertzberg, responds to this observation: "If truth be told, each one of us embodies a man and a woman.” Adding: “After all, we were created by a mother and a father. When I look at a picture of a pretty woman with sex appeal, I am always both that woman and the person looking at her. One has to be both, otherwise nothing happens.”
The multi-facetted interplay between painter, observer and model is also given a special vitality in the pictures of Charlotte Eschenlohr. This relationship grouping becomes especially interesting when one looks at a painting created in New York, which shows a Madonna. The origin of this holy figure is relatively profane. Charlotte Eschenlohr discovered the statute in the garden of a diner in Brooklyn and spontaneously decided to use it as a motive for a painting. However, she does not paint a typical, gently smiling, graceful Madonna, as presented in a conventional sense in Christian iconography. Although the lamb appears in the painting “Madonna” as an attribute, it is rather Americanized here, like a kind of Bambi à la Walt Disney.
What is significant, however, is the Madonna herself. She appears in form of a spirit – menacing, eerie, in reverie and unfamiliar. The protective Mother of God apparently has a secret – she turns into a mysterious shrouded figure and paves the way to a newly perceived femininity, beyond Catholicism, the church and the strictness of a convent. The brushstroke as a stroke of liberation, the artistic action sets a hefty exclamation mark.
For Charlotte-Eschenlohr, the act of painting itself is significant and characteristic for her work. There is no marking out, measuring, projecting or meticulous painting from a model. Instead, painting happens rather intuitively, with a lot of verve and a grand gesture, bold, dynamic and expressive. Nocturnal painting sessions with vehemently applied paint take turns with quieter sessions at the drawing table. Here too, Eschenlohr likes to work with models. She sees the rough drawings created in different techniques and formats as preliminary studies for her paintings, but also as a way of getting the feel of and getting closer to the different milieus and individuals, later brought onto the canvas by her. Over the last few years, more than 1000 drawings came about this way, all loosely connected, which stand out for an intensified, rather reduced stroke and the sparing use of color.
The explosive colorfulness in the paintings, on the other hand, is evident. Earth tones or natural colors hardly ever appear here. No muddy- insipid basic color dominates like in the paintings of the Worpsweder-based painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. Charlotte Eschenlohr prefers the expressive, garish color palette in the style of the New Wild artists – vivid red and sharp neon yellow, garish green and deep ocean blue, bright orange and dazzling pink. But also colors that appear in the works of the expressionist community of artists "Die Brücke": Emil Nolde’s watercolors and portrayals of nature, Max Pechstein’s circus scenes and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s landscapes show a similar breadth of colors. However, Charlotte Eschenlohr sometimes goes even further with her selection of color and creates disharmonies and sharp contrasts with bravely placed, powerful colors that trigger many different associations in the observer: A vivid red – representing blood, menstruation and birth, nocturnal shades of black and blue, interspersed with neon colors for the metropolitan skyline of Manhattan, which time after time becomes the preferred subject of Charlotte Eschenlohr.
In another central painting, the painter examines a currently much discussed social issue. Entitled "Patchwork" it is a presentation of the increasingly diverse unit of the “modern” family at the beginning of the 21st century. The group of characters is depicted in a public swimming pool. It is a motley group of five nude figures: three women, a man and a child. Their gestures and stance show that they belong together, form a long-term relationship, a more or less loose cohesion which functions under entirely individual, new rules and rituals. Interestingly enough, Charlotte Eschenlohr applies a
painting technique here, which was previously untypical of her. The application of color is watery and in some places the figures are outlined only in silhouette. The picture raises questions. It indicates more than it asserts.
The new course taken by Charlotte Eschenlohr with her painting has by now turned into a well-trodden path offering many different opportunities. Faithful companions en route can be found at various posts. Her impressively large, new studio in close proximity to a boxing hall frequented by “tough guys” offers her entirely new and exciting sources of friction, possibilities and perspectives. The eyes are strictly focused ahead. Most appropriate as a motto for the artistic development of Charlotte Eschenlohr is probably a quotation by the French author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir: "But if I don’t do anything else but defend this most precious possession, freedom, my passion would not have been wasted. You gave me peace; but did I want peace? You gave me the courage to always take on fear and danger, to bear all my transgressions as well as pangs of conscience that will constantly tear me apart. There is no other way."
Nicole Büsing & Heiko Klaas Jan. 15, 2008
Quotations:
Siri Hustvedt: Was ich liebte, Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Reinbek nr. Hamburg, 2003, Original edition: What I loved (2003)
Simone de Beauvoir: Das Blut der anderen, ro ro ro, paperback, 1963, original edition: Le Sang des autres (1945)
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