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No One Left at Indigo-Plateau
March 28 – April 24, 2021
Amadeus Certa
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In his latest works, Amadeus Certa develops surreal imagery in which mystical figures and spiritual references enter into a supra-religious dialogue with one another. With implicit to explicit allusions, Certa not only crosses the imagery of world religions and mysticism; in these surreal spheres, excursions into pop culture also seem to appear again and again. A Buddha figure, for example, meets rainbow-colored aureoles and symbols of the firmament, which makes Certa's fantasy worlds the ultimate symbol and search for the transcendental and spiritual.
Certa's scenes seem to be in nowhere, in a deliberately undefined space. This does not give the viewer any orientation, rather it becomes a stage for the more or less obvious religious references or freely fantasized figures. As in the stories of the Bible or the Koran, Certa's characters can be found in a desert-like wasteland – the symbolic place of searching and finding the revelation par excellence – or even in the vastness of the universe, which is limited by the image format and symbolically infinite.
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While some pictures with a three-dimensional background in color bring a certain depth of space into Certa's worlds, other picture grounds remain monochrome—in order to stand in even greater contrast to the figures.
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A bright blue head, reminiscent of a Buddha figure, stands out from the golden background. Together with the crescent moon, star and sun, this becomes a golden firmament—an impenetrable universe or a divine sphere.
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Certa's coloring of the background and the symmetrical arrangement of the picture elements conceal parallels to the traditional design of Christian icons—but without attempting an exclusively Christian iconography. Certa also mixes religious motifs of different views in other works. His focus on individual faces and heads is in the tradition of the mandylion, the Christ face of Byzantine icons.
This recourse to the image theology of the Vera Icon, the true image, calls up the paradigm of the non-human-made image of God. Certa approaches this topic with a completely new perspective. In a circle around a halo, a head reminiscent of Buddha is formed next to mask-like faces. Despite their appearance, they remain ambiguous and strange, aloof and superhuman— and yet always incredibly present.
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The question of whether there can and should be an image of the divine has been bitterly debated in the monotheistic religions for millennia.
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From the monotheistic ban on images to the fear of idolatry, the Byzantine iconoclasm to the destructive image storm of iconoclasts, the iconoclastic Fury in the era of Protestant Reformation, the main question is whether the transcendent can be visualized by human hands, an image of the incomprehensible.
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Certa in any case creates an image—creates very different images based on the iconography of different religions. He approaches well-known images of divine beings or religious leaders, whose taking up and alienation again raise the question of a possible visualization of the transcendental. The eyes of those characters are often the focus of Certa's visual worlds.
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The gaze, seeing or not seeing, has always been of central importance in religious narratives for seeing the divine, for recognizing revelation.
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In Certa's paintings, the divine or spiritual beings sometimes look directly back—disturbing and evocative. Therewith in the 21st century, Certa is once again questioning the challenges and possibilities under which images of the transcendental can be grasped at all.
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What can be made visible, seen and looked at in painting? Certa's figures direct their pupils, which are often twisted in their eye sockets, directly at the viewer: inside, who are observed or recognized themselves, even “seen through”. And involuntarily reveal themselves to the figures when they look backwards.
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Amadeus Certa (b. 1992, German) completed his studies in painting and graphics in 2016 as a master student of Siegfried Anzinger at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with distinction. For his final presentation he received the academy's degree award. Most recently Amadeus Certa was honoured with the Heinrich Vetter Prize for Fine Arts in 2018. Certa's work has already been shown in numerous national and international exhibitions, including institutions as the Schloss Ujazdowski Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw and at Port25—Room for Contemporary Art in Mannheim.
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Available works
No One Left at Indigo-Plateau: Amadeus Certa
Past viewing_room
