BENDIX HARMS
Reversed Evolution – How it feels to be Mamon
at Nino Mier Gallery September 12–October 17, 2020

All images courtesy of Ninno Mier Gallery and the artist

Who is MAMON?

Mamon is the new leader of our Danish farm Østerfælden – a cow-cat as a: weapon, a performer, a chief of forest, a melancholiac, a powerplant, a defender, a wanderer, a peacemaker, a connoisseur, a beauty, an h-bomb, an ignorant, a tactician, a killer, a yes-sayer, a charmer, a 48-name-cat, a no-sayer, a multi-radar-tracker – a huge conterpart – big enough to host the whole world inside her black and white body and impressing enough to be thrown back into the evolution: being Mamon. A perfect foundation for delivering continuously images to me – the Concrete- Contentist from Germany – because she is able to operate as a determiner and decisionsmaker – sending precise orders to my brain– as all my chosen and painted subjects do.

It feels like being a reciever of commands that can only be processed, when the relationship between me and the subject climbs on a steel-like level – achieved through love, hate, overmotivated behavior, unexpected physiognomies, humans who put names to things and animals who put names to things…. then the subject overtakes the command-center – like my wife Mari with her square-built-rascal-face, the blackcap bird with his concrete-grey body and his unscrewed black monk‘s head or Rufus the black cat – the former owner of the farm we bought in Denmark – and now the new owner: MAMON.

All are able to determine, and all are able to be formally reduced for generating a repeatable stamp – in my brain and on the canvas. These stamps let my right arm work like a machine – equipped with any kind of spatulas and scrapers, liquids for dripping and paint tubes for squeezing out words and linear elements.

The selected subject shouts his precise orders: generate me only in that way, because it‘s adequate for me, its adequate for your paint, for your tools and for art-history – in the end of an artist‘s life only one thing matters: the difference of the work in relation to history.

For me it felt like a liberation from the traditional expressive brushstroke, because each new painting could start differently: dripped, scratched, thickly spackled -completed in one session or in 100 sessions….the narrative motif is the decisionmaker, and my job is to paint them in order to make them speak.

– Bendix Harms, August 20th, Østerfælden, Denmark