Etwas Warmes im Blau

He is - as the major German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) writes about the artist Frank Rödel - "certainly one of the most widely travelled visual artists of our time, familiar with all topographies and climate zones". He travelled through the Sahara in a jeep, was travelling with the research icebreaker Polarstern, and undertook expeditions to the remote polar regions of Greenland, Iceland and Antarctica. Landscape has become the artist's central theme. The FAZ refers to his art as a “portrait of the earth” – and of the clash of opposing elements in his painting: the confrontation between nature and man. Beauty against violence and “indifferent, cold, cruel lack of empathy”. Frank Rödel's art is inspired by photographs and he uses drones to create a special perception of space and an extraordinary view of structures and distortions in nature. Both in his paintings and in his photographs, seascapes and stretches of land appear with a sometimes dramatic intensity and wild presence. What makes Frank Rödel's pictures so unusual, so fascinating, but also so unsettling? It is probably the ambivalence between an enthusiasm for nature, which is at the same time imbued with melancholy, but also sadness and pain, and the direct experience of a nature that has been severely damaged by human civilisation and is in a state of flux.