Gert Rappenecker is interested in illusions. For many years now he had programmatically lent this interest expression in a variety of media. Indeed, a key credo in his approach to art manifestly involves assessing the relationship between artificiality and sincerity, between being and appearance - and exploring the possibilities the relationship offers art. He makes use of a strategy of attacking the utopia of authenticity by ensnaring the graceful qualities of his works in the contradictory context of their factual evidentiality and the conditions under which they exist.

Gert Rappenecker's art provokes uncertainty in us. If we focus intensely on the means he uses, we perceive an enduring and thus unavoidable interplay of deception and exposure, of being and appearance. And in this interactive setting, he avoids any hierarchy between the different levels of reality, instead juxtaposing them to each other as correctives, thus consciously laying the groundwork for optional declarification.
At first sight, the group of "landscape paintings" Rappenecker has been evolving since 1993 suggest that a harmonious view of nature is authentic: We see views painted in black and white of various landscapes; the artist clearly wants us to associate them with the landscape paintings of the 18th century. Yet Rappenecker does not paint these landscapes from memory, nor does he paint at an easel while overviewing the landscapes; instead he takes his cue from the common illustrations found in travel books and the catalogues of travel agents, from which he creates out-sized b/w photocopies. He then mounts the copies on canvas and paints them as if filling in numbered squares.

In his work, Rappenecker often resorts to various forms of deception. However, his deceptions are not meant as simulations in the customary sense, as they are not intended to imitate reality. For Gert Rappenecker is interested in creating a space for experience based both critical distance and on subjective-sentimental gestures, a space that by dint of its demystification can engender new ideal images. What may seem to be a contradiction is meant as one. Rappenecker deliberately wishes to spark conflicts, namely between a Romantic view of desired images full of yearning and longing on the one hand and the ironic-critical assessment of socially sanctioned artistic means and techniques such as canvas stretchers and oil painting on the other.

Conflict is, in other words, a funamental and mediatized category in his work, one that defines the relationship between form and content. And it is always influenced by the latent doubts he kindles in the reach of aesthetic devices and the contents deployed.

This also becomes apparent in his series of "Pulps". Rappenecker impresses short sentences into landscape-format blocks of clay using letter stamps - the sentences originate in US Lifestyle magazines and horoscope collections, and he adopts them either unchanged or slightly modified. The clay blocks thus processed are then cast in aluminum, whereby traces where he smoothed the clay are still visible: the finger prints and the use of stamps can be read as the authentic trace of the creative hand of the artist. And it gives the works the quality seal of "hand-made", with a playful, ironic touch.
Sentences such as "From now on things will be different" or "This is a time of endings and beginnings, but the final outcome will be very positive" trigger any number of associations, but if you read such horoscopes in the context of glossy magazines and their lifestyle counseling columns, they serve at best as amusement - brief and superficial. They playfully offer esoterically charged questions whether we can influence our lives, whether we are not actually the slaves of some higher power, without becoming truly serious. Rappenecker upgrades these statements and at the same time places them in an ironic-critical context. He confronts these prophetic utterances with a clear use of form, content, material, and technique. With a calculated strategy, he apparently gives them back their deeper meaning, one they never actually had in the original context; and yet we hear the resounding question that can never be answered: What is the meaning of life? Will the artist be able to provide an answer?

In his group of "Pulps" Gert Rappenecker lays a fine track of quite different yet socially recognized elements of suspicion as to what constitutes a genuine work of art with a profound meaning. He makes use of different "art effects", as it were, and not only constructs and forges a "genuine artwork", but always the "genuine artist" to go with it - always with a conceptual and yet ironic stance.

For quite some time now, Gert Rappenecker has been making use atmospheric means of materials that trigger an even more theatrical effect. Specifically in his large installation he has created settings we can perambulate, and frequently they exhibit a truly animistic quality. While in the "landscape pictures" conceptually speaking the focus was more clearly on reflective processes oriented to action, in his most recent work Rappenecker has turned his attention more strongly to psychologically-related states. Using standardized and industrially manufactured materials and everyday products he devises venues bereft of people, characterized by a lonely and melancholy mood.

In his 1997 installation "Krater", Gert Rappenecker anchored windscreens on the floor in such a way that they formed a circle some nine meters in diameter. This he then filled with small pieces of polystyrene such as are usually used for packaging electrical appliances; from the midst of this white mass the antennas of old transistor radios protrude, whereby the radios channel-finders are set to ensure a permanent and diffuse buzz. From a distance the installation is beautiful, almost elegiac. Yet Rappenecker over-extends the appeal of the "beautiful image" by stressing the coldness and distance of the materials and in the tension between artistic and natural image, between reality and illusion an exemplary basis for human experience arises. In the form of "Krater" Gert Rappenecker has not only created a quite idiosyncratic and many-layered work, but, taken together with "Long Way" we find him focusing on new contents. Both installations take up the whole room, for all the manifest aesthetic appeal of the materials, they conjure up the mysterious atmosphere of a place where we are invited to wait and tarry. Indeed, they would seem to describe a state of the soul rather than visualizing some process of production. The choice of the title "Krater", the diffuse background noises and the slight protrusion of the polystyrene bits from between the windscreens triggers associations with an imminent volcanic eruption. At the same time, the protagonists of this story are presented so minimalistically that the possible eruption seems to have been frozen in some stable state of suspension.
This state of almost frightening suspense also essentially defines Gert Rappenecker's most recent work "Somewhere not here". Here again the means initially seem almost strident. In the two exhibition rooms of the cellar vaults of the Bern Municipal Gallery he created various stacks of brand new car tires in differing heights. Light is provided by common construction site spotlights placed on the floor to cast dramatic shadows. Only in the back room is there, in addition to the car tires, a single massive truck tire, in the middle of which he has placed a pane of Luminglass that responds to sound waves. Irregularly he has scattered gravel and small sharp bits of stone across the floor, and the stacks of tires almost sink into them. Moreover, in the rear left corner of the first room we find a stack of cooler packs such as are used for normal iceboxes. The scene is dominated by a loud and regular beating sound, and this causes lines to appear after each thump on the pane of Luminglass - reminiscent of lightning during a storm or the fine structure of veins in an eye. Is it a heartbeat? Perhaps Rappenecker's?

The overall situation presents less a specific location defined by the objects and the architecture and more the atmospheric outside view of an interior view. With careful calculation, Rappenecker makes use of the venue thus devised as a kind of vehicle to direct our attention in a specific direction. And this leads the imagination into a profound sense of indecision, a virtual game between surrogates and the "genuine" models on which they are based. In the process, Rappenecker instills the entire scene with great emotional impact, reflecting an interest already evidenced in his installation "Twilight zone", which he presented in early 2000 in the Martina Detterer Gallery in Frankfurt: In a landscape made of basalt gravel he positioned individual stele-like lava lamps and slight clouds of fog arose from indentations that almost resembled geysers. This is also where the different, almost coincidental and sporadic bits of dialogue come from - Rappenecker selected them from well-known movies, such as Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'éclisse".

If we compare "Twilight zone" with Rappenecker's next work "Somewhere not here", then it becomes clear that in both installations he increasingly focuses on the aesthetic means of film and on film themes. This is clear not only from the use of fragments of film dialogue, but also in the way he uses the various materials in the installation: "Somewhere not here" seems at first sight to be a film set that has been abandoned - yet it is only the actors who have disappeared. However, they are present because the objects and the relationships between them show that they do not form the stage for some actor to then take but are themselves the protagonists of the show. As in earlier works, in "Somewhere not here" Rappenecker evokes elements of forlornness and solitude as an overall image for a fundamental state of the individual, namely the conditions which constitute the subject. Everything appears unreal or theatrical, yet the various constellations prompt feelings and associations which themselves seem very real. That said, the overall situation provokes assumptions as to the nature of the profound and metaphorically charged contents, yet at the same time we sense some irritating, conceptual distance. The strong emotions are assessed to see whether they endure and are relevant.

The tension between what you actually see and what you assume is there and feel- this is essentially the quality so poignantly addressed by Gert Rappenecker's oeuvre. He blurs the boundaries between the genuine and the false: the beat in "Somewhere not here" sounds like a real heart beat. And it was such at some point, namely before, along with any number of other everyday sounds, it was synthesized and digitalized for a common retail CD of different sound samples.

It is in keeping with the zeitgeist to critically discuss the nature of authenticity and the claim that it actually exists. Indeed, the constant shift between the different forms of reality allows you to practice creating ever new surrogates. However, Gert Rappenecker's oeuvre has a great depth, a clear sense of ambivalence, perhaps also because it does not offer some solution to the problem of the different states and their respective ranking. "Somewhere not here" tells a topical and thus heterogeneous story about the search for physical reality as the possible symbol of the last bastion of real forms of communication.