Christian Moeller on Brooklyn Art Project

Painting is the real big challenge in my life. I am very happy because I never wanted to be anything else but a painter. And the story of my life offers endless material to me.

I was born in the southwest industrial city Ludwigshafen/Rhein/Germany and grew up in a time where the generation of my parents was busy with drowning the fright and aftermath of the war with consumption and the conception of an ideal world. At home was like hell on earth and in school I felt like a stranger. I wanted to break free from this limitedness with its prefabricated, dependent conventions. Speech, means of expression of the school, the society and my home, to me was always an instrument of those regimentations (about the origin of speech in the human brain they say the following: First comes the form then the content and what won’t match in the end will simply be corrected) and so all that was left was vision. The vision was a world of its own. I held on to that and didn’t let go of it to this day.

I create a picturesque room, by making the invisible visible. My works that appear very dramatic are always also directed to the shady sides and the mental abyss of the human existence, with all their facets: What lies in the secrecy and poses questions to me. They address subjects like destruction, pain, violence, horror and chaos. My worldly wisdom is the agitated one in which you cannot breathe. The lies, that all ways of life and thinking patterns, all legal systems are involved with, are after all just a reflection of the lies and dazzlements of the elementary mental relationships. During my studies in 1990 I began to paint my pictures solely in shades of black and white. In the course of time the initial cemetery-, night – and industrial landscapes changed to strong expansive, profound and bulky painting. I often deal with historical subjects, like the Industrialization, the history of the European witch-hunt in the early modern times or the Christianization and its consequences.

I live a very solitary and humble life: My world is small but my universe is huge. At the beginning of my studies I’ve had role models like Anselm Kiefer, later on it was Pollock and de Kooning and of course the many outstanding painters of the Italian Renaissance like Antonio Allegri, known better as Correggio and others. I left that behind in my work when I discovered that I have everything in me that it takes for me to develop my own aesthetic using my perception.

The human being has always the choice to develop their own conception of the world or to adapt the prefabricated conceptions of others. And in my opinion there are only two big interest groups of people, depending on their social position and the viewpoint they developed from that: The ones who want to maintain what’s there because they profit from it and the others who strive for a change and want to explore the coherences and the conditions. In my artistry I chose the latter. But exactly this is my challenge, to face up and show who I am. In the end it’s the own emotional relation to the things that are surrounding me, that affect the own aesthetics. It is the recognition of the own life in formal (social and societal) forms of appearances.

My paintings are similar to a stage play. The stage setting – which in my case would be the paint – is kept simple on purpose, to allow myself to evolve my inner monologue – the form. But different from an actor, in my studio I go beyond the mere identification with my own figures. I live them.

Christian Moeller