Der letzte Soldat 1991

Siegfried Zademack made "Der Letzte Soldat," its date escapes me but that's ok. Zademack's got this meticulous, almost surreal way of layering paint, it's not quite photorealism. It's too eerie, uncanny. I keep coming back to the surface quality here. It's smooth, really smooth, and that kind of makes the image even more unsettling. Like it's a dream, or a memory, or a nightmare. It’s not just the war-torn landscape in the background either, it’s this weird tension between the hyper-real and the totally unreal. Like those candles, for instance – painted with such precision they almost seem to glow. And then you’ve got this wooden doll, so obviously fake, but somehow vulnerable too. It’s a strange piece, almost an echo of the Neue Sachlichkeit painters like Otto Dix or George Grosz, but there's also something very current about it, something about the artifice of it all. We like art that gives us more questions than answers, don't we?