The art of Rainer Gross always had a personal relation, but there was one biographical event that influenced his painting in a very special way: 1993, at the age of 42, the artist, in his second marriage with the American Cynthia Cannell, became a father. The birth of his daughter Clara effectuated a marked disruption of his development, the transition from the figurative to the abstract. In his own words he “wanted to grow up at last” and turned, for a number of years, to “Fingertip Tinglings”, a very reduced, meditative way of painting, consisting only of the superimposition of different patterns.

It was somewhat by chance – provided there can be anything like chance on this artistic level – that Rainer Gross discovered, when he produced monotypes on paper, how fascinating the amorphous remnants of colour were which stuck to the roughened surface of the acrylic plate after printing. Gross began to look for a method to create this kind of colour phenomena in large-scale paintings, too. He discovered the technique of pressing canvases coloured by different colour-materials on each other. One of the two was covered with dry pigments, the other one with still wet oil colours. Carefully separating the two canvases made many or few layers of pigment stick to the wet oil colours, correlating with the pressure exerted. So each time a pair of identical twins were generated, albeit with “genetic defects”, as both twins weren’t only reversed in orientation, but also because the deeper layers of pigment came out on top of the other canvas and the pigments reacted with each other differently in each case. Using this technique, Gross was able to accentuate a multitude of different subjects: structure, colour, chance, process, but also conceptual questions concerning the states of original and duplicate, respectively copy.

The fact that Rainer Gross incorporates company logos or signets of pop culture like the Batman symbol or Mickey Mouse in his “Contact Paintings” shows that he wants to integrate an external relation, a subject matter in his painting again. But it would be premature to say that by doing so he had left abstract painting. One could even say that the “Logo Paintings” are abstractions of abstractions. This is because logos are in themselves abstract, sign-like compactions not only as indicators of certain products, but also of fundamental principles of global capitalism (the role of advertising, the big companies as global players a.s.o.); in many cases logos very decisively stand for a sense of life. The white curved lettering on red background of Coca Cola, for instance, stands like no other symbol for the American Way of Life and is understood this way all over the world and quoted in many contexts. Newer logos like those of Apple, Facebook or Twitter stand for the lifestyle of the younger generation, integrating as a matter of course being online and communication in social networks.

By fragmenting the signs and partly showing them in reverse or turning them out of their usual position he plays with an effect of alienation. In some cases one will immediately recognize the logos, in others, the process of abstraction has gone so far as to make recognition more difficult or leave the beholder in uncertainty. Since the creation of a series of 41 by 41 cm (16.14 by 16.14 in) large “Logo Paintings” on paper from summer 2011 onwards, he has compiled a whole panorama of predominantly American and German company logos. Looking at these works one realises, how strongly the collective memory, mainly influenced by advertising and the mass media, is studded with company logos. Fragmenting allows Gross to play with alienation and recognition, leading to amusing effects, when, for instance, the LEGO-logo of the Danish

building-set system is shortened in a way so that initially you only see “EGO” – a sudden reminder that the sociology of the post-modern individual already speaks of “patchwork identities” and “Crafting existence”.

With the logo as motif Rainer Gross is consciously joining the specific context of American painting. It will suffice to name just a few examples: Just think of Edward Hopper’s famous gas station painting “Gas” of 1940 with the winged red horse of the Mobilgas Company, of Larry Rivers’ countless paraphrases of the Camel cigarette packs or of Andy Warhol’s Brillo-Boxes and Campbell’s Soup cans, and not to forget Robert Indiana, who changed the word “love” into a pop logo of world-wide recognition. By using company logos in American Pop art, painting and graphic design meet at eye-level, and it just there that Gross’s “Logo Paintings” differ, as they are decisive painterly adaptations of these Pop art motifs. Logos depend on clarity, on easy readability and recognition. This way they represent a unequivocal, “clean” image. In every day life we therefore always meet logos printed in strong colours on glossy paper, as neon ads or on computer screens, on polished surfaces of plastic or metal. In Rainer Gross’s work the colours are broken, the surfaces roughened, and the readability made difficult by fragmentation. A lot of his logos look as if the ravages of time have been at them, as if they were weathered billboards, archaeological finds of a long distanced future, in which one looks, bewildered, at the remnants of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Is that a quiet expression of irony, a hint at criticism of capitalism – and thus a typically European view of consumerism? It is, probably, more subtle: Rainer Gross looks at a phenomenon of today’s world with the eyes of a painter, a phenomenon that reduces our perception to a simple stimulus-reaction pattern. A curved yellow M on a red surface – McDonald’s – and promptly follows a locked schema: Fast Food, like it or leave it. Logos are there to transmit information fast so that we can react to it. By transubstantiating this element of our present information-swamped visual culture into painting, he slows recognition down: The logos as such are recognisable and yet they turn into something else; Colours, forms, nuances, contrasts, materially prehensile surfaces, textures. Under the eyes of the painter recognition is being decelerated: Looking at the “Logo Paintings” we understand more, differently, more nuances, and more consciously than in everyday life, where we only react reflexively to visual stimuli. Rainer Gross’s painting does not content itself with affirmation.

Translation: John McNaughten