Looking at Werner Büttner’s painting, ‘The Marking of the Abyss’ (pictured), you can immediately see why its title was also chosen for the show as a whole. Painted in the German artist’s typically scrubby, distressed style, it depicts the kind of mountainous, wistfully rugged setting you’d normally associate with a Romantic-era painting but with the addition of a lone dog cocking its leg against a tree, relieving itself into the shadowy chasm below. Quite literally, then, the painting’s a pisstake – a way of puncturing grandiose, overblown notions about sublime and ineffable nature. Yet it also makes a serious point about our continual yearning for such exalted or numinous experiences – in the way that the dog’s gesture can also be read as an act of appreciation, a kind of crude communion.
It’s this combination of the jokey and the serious, the whimsical and the solemn, that defines Büttner’s work. Different paintings critique different ideas of transcendence. There’s nature, again, in ‘The Days Are Running Away Like Noble Steeds Over the Hills’, with its equine jumble of decrepit, pasty, dribbly shapes. Or there’s religion, in ‘Culture Scene’, with its three saints drunkenly giving fascist salutes. Sometimes the irony feels slightly obvious, as in the giant letters ‘LOVE’ surrounded by fornicating skeletons; while in other pieces the meaning feels obscure, even though the image itself is powerfully direct, as in the bouquet of flowers sprouting from a hare.
These sorts of surreal juxtapositions reflect Büttner’s process – he starts off by combining found images into collages before working some up into final paintings. Yet some of the best pieces here have been kept at the smaller, more concentrated collage stage. A teddy bear superimposed against melting candle wax (‘Homemade Tears’), a snowman upended on its head (‘Doctor, How Am I…?’) – these images feel caustic, sarcastic, yet at the same time terribly poignant.
Gabriel Coxhead