"INTELLIGENT AND GOOD LOOKING", André Debus, Stadttheater Fürth, Fürth, Bavaria,

22.01. - 13.03.2012

[André Debus]

Fürther Nachrichten, 27.01.2012, CLAUDIA SCHULLER

The sky is full of chillies

Art-Agency Hammond shows witty oil paintings by André Debus in the Stadttheater

FÜRTH - he knows the ins and outs of self-mockery: "Intelligent and good looking", was the name André Debus, the artist from Nuremberg, gave to his current exhibition in the Stadttheater presented by Art Agency Hammond.

André Debus loves to smuggle a loved penchant in the picture: himself. You can see the painter, born in 1978 in a classic pose before his easel, in a lavish bacchanalia surrounded by nudes, dancing with a skeleton, with a medieval hood under a gallow, in battle with the baser instincts, as an enlarged self with various small Debusses on the hand. He does push-ups, works as Rembrandt on the laptop, has on one self-portrait a bone hand and looks on another at himself as a competitor in a stiff ruff - Debus in all situations.

He likes to put his alter ego in typical, familiar art-historical scenarios, adds a hint of spice in religious representations, enjoys baroque richness and modern life and ridicules pining romanticism. He sets a springing dolphin in a native river; he dares to dance with joy in front of a nuclear power plant, on horseback he jumps over Dürer’s rabbit.

Debus juggles swiftly with motifs - and allows the ball to fall occasionally. Coming straight down to earth with his "The Romance's End", a deeply educated middle-class genre painting, depicting a crying, incredibly ugly old maid, who must have been abandoned probably in the late 19th century. The artist's firm grasp of a figurative style of painting is thankfully of no embarrassment. People and animals are expertly poured into oil or linocut implemented, the aura of old paintings is well recognised. A large work even includes the words "copy" - just to avoid misunderstandings. André Debus sometimes over does his zeitgeist irony. Audacity does not always win - but sometimes.