Baumlandschaft 1935

Richard Oelze made this strange and evocative landscape, Baumlandschaft, with either charcoal or graphite. The artist worked the tones on the paper like a magician, blending and rubbing, and layering in marks to pull out the image. It looks like a world of dreams, maybe even nightmares. The smooth sky has a kind of biomorphic form lurking within it and below it is the gnarled tangle of the “tree-scape." What is it about the tactile quality of charcoal that makes it so perfect for images of the subconscious? Look at the way he teases out the image of a bird in flight and the soft focus of the middle ground, and that amazing, tortured tree trunk in the foreground which rises up like a figure. It has the feel of Max Ernst, but I also find echoes of Odilon Redon in the way Oelze evokes the unseen world. Making art is always a dialogue, a kind of remix of all that has gone before.