Naked TruthVIII Drawing

As source of the paintings "Naked Truth" I used old erotic playing cards from the Reeperbahn in Hamburg from the 60ies. The painting has like a playing card two sites: On the front side you will see a nude and on the back side an ornamtical card drawing. The back side painting can differ form card to card. Asta Rode – A Puzzling Cosmos Every world of pictures created by an artist is its own cosmos which connects the everyday with the imagination. Asta Rode’s work confronts one at first sight with things which are familiar; a forest, a house or animal. Yet somehow the objects depicted appear peculiar. Things meet which do not belong together, the scale is not what the eye is used to, the colour not that of reality. All this is then coupled with a graphic structure, rich in detail, which brings reality to the individual objects. Asta Rode works with the rarely used technique of oil transfer to lend her work a unique signature. This technique has been used since the 17th century and is known in modern art mainly through the work of Paul Klee. Asta Rode’s works have an irritating effect. A boat floats through the tree trunks of a wood in which pink lanterns hover. The colours assigned to individual areas or objects intensify the peculiar character of the oil transfer drawing. An orange lupin is admired by a pink bird, purple mushrooms stand before a bird of prey. Everything is precise and recognisable in detail and yet it is all strange and puzzling. We see the things without understanding them. Besides figurative and landscape elements, three dimensional elements such as spheres and oval shapes appear in the latest charcoal drawings. These elements irritate because the structures seen on their surface seem abstract. Viewing them in more detail one realises that the spherical shapes are placed like rounded mirrors which distort their immediate surroundings. The motif, mostly a landscape, undergoes a change which our eye is unable to immediately revert back to the original. This creates tension when viewing Asta Rode’s work. The shape of the distorted duplication of a motif in a rounded mirror existed already during the Renaissance. The artists then wanted to put their painting abilities to the test, whereas Asta Rode fathoms the relationship between volume and line and questions the definition of reality in two dimensional image space. Asta Rode’s pictures show that every encounter is but a temporary engagement. Author: Julienne Franke

Drawing:Oil on Cardboard

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:27.6 W x 39.4 H x 0.4 D in

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