Some entities can, when we look at them, communicate with us. They tell us more than we see with eyes. Like the surface or color. They communicate with us. They can let us feel a rhythm. And the rhythm comes before the music. Creating music today, we mostly create a good rhythm before we create music. Some anthropologists say (I’m not sure if Levy – Strauss said it), that ancient cultures, mostly shaman cultures, used all the same rhythm. Rhythm can let us dance and the dance can let us forget. But rhythm is not only important for music. It’s also important for writing. Homer used it as well as Shakespeare. And even if a writer doesn´t use it (like Bursa in his poems), he worked with it. Because when we break the rhythm, the audience can feel it. The entity then has nothing to say. Or it says that it´s broken. Husserl spent hours to find out, what an entity can tell us.
When we use rhythm in paintings, it may be possible to dance. In the rhythm. Thorsten’s paintings have that rhythm. When we look at them, we can feel it. As I said describing his previous exhibition (here), we can feel the music in his pictures. And then maybe we can dance to the music. Try it. Just look and dance.
Thorsten is a painter and DJ from Hamburg, Germany. He is inspired by funk, dub, Hip-Hop, and what we know as Black Music. But also by writers like Paul Auster and Toni Morrison. And also by street art, by Outsider art (in Germany known as Art Brut), and also by the Cobra Group.
We are proud to present a second exhibition by Thorsten Raab.