ROAM INACCESSIBLE PATHS
By Raffael Bader

BWG Gallery presents Roam Inaccessible Paths, German Artist Raffael Bader’s first international solo exhibition.

 

Throughout this exhibition Bader freely explores the nature of the ‘self’, and of human interactions, through painterly projections of the Earth. Bader’s abstract renditions of landscapes and expressionist responses to his own journeying through quiet corners of the natural world, allows him to reflect on the connections, conflicts and strengths we find within ourselves along the way.

 

The undefined paths we roam in Bader’s painting reach both outside and inside ourselves. Bader’s often-unexpected colours strongly communicate the emotions he felt while experiencing these places, revisited through acts of mixing and applying paint. Like the rising and falling tides, and the shadow of a mountain stretching across the plain, the boundary lines and surfaces in these paintings (which Bader achieves using mixed applications of rhythmic line work, thinned paint, impasto strokes, oil stick, and pastel shading) allow him to subvert our expectations by playing with perspective and scale. These painterly examinations open the geometries and surfaces of the world to us at the same time as they open Bader to a greater understanding of human emotional and other relationships to the earth, revealing his place in nature to be one of loneliness, connectedness, symbiosis, chaos, danger and beauty.

 

Notes on the earlier part of this process-based journey, with associated works, are directly explored in the supporting art book ’22 published alongside the exhibition by Verlag Marian Arndt.

 

Roam Inaccessible Paths is also a literal crossing of multiple paths in paintings that draw on Bader’s experiences and reflections whilst directly or indirectly experiencing landscapes such as the Canyons of Mexico, the US National Parks, the Australian Outback, the Aegean Sea Islands, the Bohemian, Bavarian & Thuringian Forests, and other oceans, seas, volcanoes, and plateaus. These outer environments in turn function as portals of access to inner environments, in which we can walk our own solitary paths.

 

The natural state of a journey, be it one of travelling, painting, or reflecting, includes a tempering of the pace with which we roam. All these states demand a longer way of looking, a pace encouraged by the placement of 4 viewpoint benches, making the inaccessible accessible, and the unspeakable speakable. The enlightening views and personal horizons we gain through experiencing Bader’s art allow these paths of travelling, painting, and reflecting to converge in ourselves as the honest, beautiful, expressive vistas they are.

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Many thanks to writer, philosopher, and collector Stephen Baycroft for editing the text.