{"id":2627,"date":"2022-11-01T17:05:46","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T16:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.benjamin-novalis.de\/theory\/"},"modified":"2025-09-30T15:07:02","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T13:07:02","slug":"theory","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.benjamin-novalis.de\/en\/theory\/","title":{"rendered":"Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Not So Wild: – Hans-J\u00fcrgen Hafner, 2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the end of 2021, the idea that (punk) rock and painting get along well together has become so thoroughly normalized that the only thing worth mentioning is that both\u2014rock and painting\u2014carry their own burdens. It fits that in rock and painting, the supposedly dead persist longer. Whether this is truly an advantage remains to be seen. Right now, authorities are reporting the arrest of Christian Rosa, a fallen star in the world of Crapstraction: his brand of rock\u2019n\u2019roll is painted for models and those who aspire to be models, in the spirit of authenticity. The accusation? Forgery\u2014specifically, works formerly attributed to that old master of punk graphic art and now midcult art star, Raymond Pettibon.

The ease with which we encounter the painting rocker or the rocking painter\u2014be it in the gallery down the street, on Instagram, or on the Sunset Strip\u2014is precisely what\u2019s become taken for granted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in the late 1970s, it was still \u201cwildness\u201d that served as a central term\u2014not so much to bridge music and visual art as distinct arts or genres, but rather to reconcile two forms of practice and production that had been sorted by tradition into \u201centertaining\u201d (or industrialized) and \u201cserious\u201d (or bourgeois-artistic) categories. Wildness became the final word in a string of final words, posing as a solution to keeping the culturally separated under one roof. The thread linking punk and painting, pop and high culture, lay in the \u201cwild\u201d as their shared, inherent transgressive potential\u2014and “Geile Tiere”, proverbially, was the band project born from this, more \u201cqueer\u201d than \u201crock,\u201d featuring artists known in the art world as the \u201cJunge Wilde\u201d: Luciano Castelli, Salom\u00e9 (n\u00e9 Wolfgang Ludwig Cilharz), and part-time co-performer Rainer Fetting.

There was no need to panic: that imagined, wild super-art, fusing the best of both worlds\u2014or, in the language of record companies and cultural bureaucracy, fully deploying \u201ccrossover potential\u201d\u2014never actually emerged from this episodic blend. Not even when the \u201cwild,\u201d which quickly fell out of fashion, drifted simultaneously toward \u201cgenius\u201d and \u201cdilettantism\u201d in consciously or unconsciously subcultural settings, regardless of whether the institutional or disciplinary border between image-making and sound, between art and pop (or \u201cthe people\u201d), could ever really be upheld. Economically, though, one thing remains true: many still pay for the few, especially in pop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cnew spirit of capitalism,\u201d which has swept across the world for some forty years now, cares little for philology and certainly not for history. It is precisely for this reason that today\u2019s discourse on \u201cartistic practice\u201d naturally assumes that anyone working as an artist can\u2014or even must\u2014also engage as a participant in music, ideally playing in their own band as part of an individually branded artistic \u201cproject,\u201d framed positively under the rubric of \u201cartistic subjectivity.\u201d Today, subjectivity primarily means acting as a personal brand, throwing literally \u201ceverything\u201d\u2014skills, labor, hobbies, ideals, habitus, identity, heritage, even bare existence\u2014onto the frontline as potentially commodifiable resources, whether in the analog or digital worlds. In other words: fully deploying crossover potential.

It would be nice if, in this process, a couple of bucks would come our way, enough to keep the artists\u2019 social insurance happy and to afford the next exhibition participation. It is precisely these societal, economic, and institutional abstractions that are hardly conducive to an artistic life or the individual production and\/or exploitation of cultural products\u2014yet the persistent, personal will and capability to make art must still assert itself in opposition. (As a side note: a frustrating, technologically explainable collateral problem is that I no longer need to ask you about your favorite record or beloved painting when the algorithm predicts my question and already knows your answer. Just thinking about this is\u2026 cringe.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Offering an answer to how music and art relate as professional and\/or amateur activities\u2014positioned between production\/labor and consumption\/pleasure\u2014is far from straightforward. Both music and art serve as foundations for cultural commodities that are hyper-coded according to their own logics, simultaneously \u201cunaffordable\u201d and \u201cfree,\u201d and notoriously overdetermined as cultural heritage (your taste, my museum, or my playlist). These cultural forms would first need to be tailored in such a way that they can even be meaningfully engaged with, without inevitably collapsing into mere posing from the outset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notably, the attribute \u201cwild\u201d does not come to mind when I look at Benjamin Novalis Hofmann\u2019s paintings, which almost surprises me in a guy who, on one hand, references Novalis\u2014certainly not the krautrockers\u2014and, on the other, frequently sports Mot\u00f6rhead T-shirts. Rather, what I encounter in his work is a sense of construction, assemblage, perhaps even syntax\u2014a reading further reinforced by considering his image series and bodies of work that unfold over extended periods.

Absent too is the calculated or tongue-in-cheek embrace of \u201cbadness\u201d as a more or less successful translation of punk\u2019s (rock) musical subversion and cultural negation into \u201cbad painting.\u201d Yet these paintings do not shy away, emphatically, from being \u201cpainting\u201d and from asserting that painting, when successful, is both a deeply material act and a generator of image and art\u2014even if that doesn\u2019t automatically guarantee interesting pictures or good art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although these works are overtly paintings, they do not seem to appeal to a \u201ctaste\u201d aligned with the genre\u2014neither materially, conceptually, referentially, nor discursively. Each image, despite the serial work, formal or semantic coherence, and the context of the larger body of work, stubbornly points back to itself, repeatedly attempting an \u201cescape from Alcatraz\u201d without ever shedding its inmate uniform. This is a form of art, because painting is a historically and institutionally fortified prison, supported not least by substantial funding, from which it is difficult to escape\u2014even through deliberately bad or consciously anti-painting gestures. The guards watch closely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, these works elude the two interrelated frameworks that define painting\u2019s status within the continuum of so-called \u201ccontemporary art.\u201d One framework concerns art\u2019s contemporaneity\u2014not merely as representation but as production in the broadest sense\u2014within which painting as a practice competes with other multimedia, performative, participatory, or activist practices and is comparatively less \u201curgent.\u201d Its well-documented longue dur\u00e9e as an image medium inside and outside of art can even feel disruptive.

The other framework pertains specifically to painting\u2019s role as technique, genre, and image medium within the contemporary, and how painting, when consciously \u201cpainted,\u201d exploits this fraught position while simultaneously asserting its claim to be art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, Benjamin\u2019s paintings do not trade on \u201cwildness,\u201d \u201crock attitude,\u201d or \u201cbadness.\u201d Rather, they pursue a highly disciplined and direct engagement with subjects such as landscape, figure, and veduta\u2014approaching these themes, to some extent, in an academic manner. This sensibility is further reinforced by his serial methodology, which both solidifies and liquefies pictorial ideas and processes, moving, so to speak, from the (combat) star to the figure, from landscape to nugget.

Particularly where painting manifests in its purest, gestural form\u2014such as in the series of format-bound \u201cPatches\u201d (2013), whose compositions are strictly determined by the dimensions of fan patches popular in heavy metal culture, bearing band logos, cover art, and the like\u2014we encounter the clearest references to popular music cultures, even as they remain embedded within painting itself. This takes place through a painterly approach both rigorously controlled and conceptually calculated, inevitably reflecting back on the medium\u2019s tools: color and application, gesture and motif. The explosively graphic-art motifs of patches from bands like Death, Iron Maiden, or Slaughter are simultaneously thickly painted over, colorfully countered, and finely dissected, with letters and skeletal fragments floating to the surface\u2014resonating with the musically and symbolically constructed counter-worlds that metal and punk have circulated, especially since the late 1980s in extreme mutations like death metal and grindcore, caught in ongoing tension with their either excessive or insufficient cultural-industrial reach.

This also serves as a reminder that discipline\u2014undoubtedly required in extreme measure to unleash oneself properly during, \u201cRegurgitated Guts\u201d off Death\u2019s seminal album “Scream Bloody Gore” \u2014and transgression are by no means mutually exclusive, while Geile Tiere have always been comparatively easy to come by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hans-J\u00fcrgen Hafner<\/em><\/strong>

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Aesthetic metabolisms<\/strong> – Raphael Nocken, 2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the past twenty years, Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann has been cultivating a repertoire of motifs and developing bodies of work that weave allusive references and render the traditional division between abstraction and figuration increasingly untenable. It is therefore challenging, when considering a text that spans nearly two decades of his artistic production, to avoid falling into descriptive or stylistic categories that offer only tenuous footing\u2014categories that risk overlooking or excluding critical aspects and ultimately fail to do justice to the complexity of such an expansive oeuvre.

For this reason, it is more productive to step away from seemingly stable yet relatively narrow stylistic labels: bad painting, abstract painting, representational painting, or painting liberated from present concerns\u2014what fresh, original perspectives could these terms really offer on Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann\u2019s work? Perhaps it may be useful for quick classification to know if the artist aligns with post-representational painting, but such banal terminology hardly inspires genuine interest in engaging with the artist\u2019s aesthetic thinking or probing the substance of that thinking beyond language\u2014the \u201cthinking in other media.\u201d

From this reflection emerge the following observations, which focus exemplararily on a few selected series, since the diverse body of Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann\u2019s work ultimately weaves intricately and skillfully together across multiple strands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What is readily apparent is the artist\u2019s pronounced interest in the geological: matter, dust, soil, and minerals. The Interstellar<\/em> series features expansive, blurred pictorial fields punctuated by round forms that emerge from the depths\u2014suggestive of planets, perhaps distant stars. These are abstract formations rendered in richly shifting colors, allowing if anything only faint allusions to landscape. They evoke mineral-toxic soils that conceal something other, something indeterminate. Are contemporary environmental catastrophes being alluded to here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though the series titles resonate with dystopian potential, it would be misguided to ascribe a dystopian vision to the artist\u2019s work. Even well into the 21st century, scientific inquiry continues to grapple with the fundamental question of how matter became biologically alive\u2014and revisits the question of life\u2019s origins with renewed rigor. It is difficult to pose the question of biological origin when no singular, determinate beginning ever truly existed. How might one fix such a moment, which was never just one moment, whose origin cannot be pinpointed in a definitive temporal frame, understood as a discrete, measurable event? Rather, life\u2019s emergence is better conceived as a phenomenon of indeterminacy, motion, and multiplicity. Life arose in many places and at different times, possibly even within mutually isolated systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One critical aspect of geologization is recognizing what is called geological life\u2014that is, the mineral dimension embedded within the human constitution. Indeed, all organic bodies\u2014whether human, animal, plant, fungal, or bacterial\u2014are deeply entwined in the geological-mineral system through their metabolic functions and evolutionary ancestors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann\u2019s work, color conglomerates that form the \u201cearths\u201d seem never quite settled on how to assume a finite shape. The colors remain perpetually coiled, smoky, and indefinite; interlocked but never fused or blended so as to form a coherent mass. The indeterminacy of the mineral, of color itself, constitutes the very essence of these works. This \u201cobfuscation of the reified color mass\u201d recurs throughout his series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both UTOPIA_LOST_IN_CHAOS<\/em> and the FUTURE_EDGELANDS<\/em> series\u2014note again the beautifully dystopian tonalities of these titles\u2014feature bold, radiant applications of color that are, however, blurred and separated by painterly interventions at their edges. The colors must share the precarious picture plane, closely interwoven yet isolated. What do we actually see\u2014wild color clouds (UTOPIA_LOST_IN_CHAOS<\/em>), or tightly, vertically abutting layers of paint (FUTURE_EDGELANDS<\/em>) that simply exist without any evident attempt at form-making?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes blurred softly along the edges, sometimes sharply wiped with a swift brushstroke, the painting becomes a sedimented force of earth history\u2014becoming, in effect, a geological act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann\u2019s works evoke events of recent decades, particularly their visual traces as disseminated through photographs and video media, portraying a world marked by planetary catastrophes. A multiplicity of disaster images converge to form a new aesthetic field\u2014an iconology of the Anthropocene. Within this corpus, one encounters vast, global, and indelible forest fires; marine dead zones where life is no longer possible, visually marked by swarms of dead fish floating on the sea\u2019s surface; oil slicks and burning landfills serving as visual ciphers of industrial devastation; emerging pandemics that impose transformative pressures worldwide with long-term consequences.

These new visual and experiential spaces of the world pose radical challenges to the cultural self-understanding of industrial societies and their relationship to the \u201cunthinkable world,\u201d especially nature. In doing so, they continually demand reflection \u201con humanity in relation to its real, hypothetical, or speculative extinction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann\u2019s compositions become increasingly dissociated from concrete objects in our reality is evident in the works from the two series SPIDERMAN<\/em> and SILVER SURFER<\/em>. The artist presents the figures from the Silver Surfer<\/em> and Spiderman<\/em> series isolated in space, placing them against empty or monochromatically colored fields. A synthesis between pictorial space and figure only gradually emerges throughout the series. In preliminary stages, organic proliferations anchor figuration within the pictorial field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A defining feature of this antihumanism is the overcoming of traditional portraiture, resulting in a total negation of the human as personality\u2014in contrast to the object. The wildly expansive compositions concentrate compositionally on the center of the image, with little emphasis placed on the densification of paint matter. Hofmann generates a powerful chromatic tension through his use of black and red, dominating the entire pictorial structure. This tension is also apparent in the manner of painting: at times, the brush is laden thickly with oil paint; at others, the brushstroke is barely perceptible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even more pronounced is this tension in the act of painting itself: Hofmann physically engages with the canvas. He presses the brush forcefully into the surface, causing paint to push out along the edges of the brush. He scrapes and scratches away paint; fingerprint and tube marks remain visible. This vigorous technique produces a dynamic energy throughout the work. The entire composition seems alive, in perpetual motion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upon first encountering the Spiderman<\/em> series, the viewer instinctively associates the imagery with the human body. Yet the question arises: does Hofmann truly depict a humanoid? All defining human features are absent; there are no fixed boundaries\u2014neither in color nor form. Rather, Hofmann appears to have created a new reality. The notion of an organic humanoid is recognizable and intuitively associated by the viewer, yet the artist has not rendered a likeness of reality, but rather a being related to the humanoid. The image as a formerly representative pars pro toto of the world is constructed here as something autonomous and self-legislating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Formal elements are fragmented, and the figure is not clearly delineated in a mimetic sense; the formal means find no referential anchor to objects that would allow for identifiable forms. Instead, the graphic tools independently generate new formal structures. The image thus detaches from its object, revealing natural analogues within the body\u2019s basic form. By intensifying the reality effect of his images and foregrounding the mineral-organic nature of his pictorial inventions as the essence of his aesthetic metabolism, Hofmann creates compositions of striking presence and power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work of painter Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann presents itself as, in the best sense, a hermetic oeuvre\u2014distinguished by its aesthetic rigor, artificial pictorial aesthetics, religious-philosophical dimensions, and the indeterminacy of its meaning. The questions he revisits time and again unfold not through linear or rational sequences, but as assemblages\u2014ensemble-like compositions of visual and acoustic impressions that are diverse and variable in their interpretive depth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analogous to Walter Benjamin\u2019s writings, one can discern in Hofmann\u2019s depiction of different natures\u2014both the primordial mineral nature and the secondary human nature\u2014complex relations between natural history and allegorical form. For the viewer, the pictorial fields marked as image-spaces and inhabited by mineral and organic forces constitute the arena in which the boundary to the world-without-us can be experienced in its terrifying yet seductive dimensions. Norbert P. Franz names this the Tremendum<\/em> and the Fascinans<\/em>. These elements make possible the experience of the numinous, which precisely consists of these two ingredients: the Tremendum<\/em> and the Fascinans<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this, one aligns with Eugene Thacker\u2019s assertion that \u201cthe numinous is the liminal human experience in confrontation with the world as something absolutely nonhuman, the world as the \u2018wholly other,\u2019 that which remains in the unspeakable mystery beyond all creatures.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Raphael Nocken<\/em><\/strong>

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In his paintings, Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann stages an existential struggle over the world of painting. Abstract or figurative, colored or colorless, glossy or matte\u2014often all at once or in juxtaposition. These are probing questions posed to painting itself, and ultimately, to the artist\u2019s own practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this provisional stage, Hofmann presents an ambitious transcendence of conventional painterly boundaries and genres. Motif-wise, he offers us iconographic puzzles to unravel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His titles, drawn mostly from literary fragments\u2014poems or novels\u2014pose a question: do they serve to explain the images, or do they simply open further interpretive layers within his pictorial world? The question is ultimately ancillary, for it is Hofmann\u2019s painterly obstinacy that clearly dominates. Here lie the true qualities of the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hofmann does not merely absorb painterly tradition; he recombines it, turning the combination into a montage. His painting is so densely layered that one suspects he deliberately resists producing a homogenous or consistent oeuvre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet it is precisely in this continuity of effort that a remarkable coherence emerges, providing a shared denominator for all phases and dialectical leaps of his practice. This stance of painterly inquiry betrays a certain hubris and obsession. His drive toward sublimation, focusing intently on painting, results in works of striking independence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within a single image, Hofmann approaches all other images simultaneously. Perhaps initially conceived as a compromise, his painterly layers evolve into an autonomous work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Color dominates above all. Often screamingly intense, it contributes alongside formal variations to holding the tension within the image. The works are extraordinarily alive in their effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In pursuit of a distinct aesthetic entity, Hofmann has embraced the question of all or nothing\u2014ultimately choosing everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peter H. Forster <\/strong>\u2013 published in:
\u201eBis ans Ende der Welt\u201c, Verlag Revolve<\/strong>r

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Not So Wild: – Hans-J\u00fcrgen Hafner, 2022 By the end of 2021, the idea that (punk) rock and painting get along well together has become so thoroughly normalized that the only thing worth mentioning is that both\u2014rock and painting\u2014carry their own burdens. It fits that in rock and painting, the supposedly dead persist longer. Whether […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2627","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjamin-novalis.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjamin-novalis.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjamin-novalis.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjamin-novalis.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjamin-novalis.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2627"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjamin-novalis.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3041,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjamin-novalis.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2627\/revisions\/3041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjamin-novalis.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}