Jürgen Trautwein: The Sound of the Rain Needs No Translation

Pop up reception: location
455A Valencia, SF, CA 94103

Juergen Trautwein presents his 6th show with 60SIX, “the sound of the rain needs no translation.”

This reductive suite of paintings, like most of Trautwein’s series’ uses visual and conceptual content from his last body of work as momentum into the next. In “Train Ride to Luxor” the flat horizontal paintings with a trancelike light inner white glow bounced the viewer’s eye from flat space to deep space and back again. In the new work the viewer steps almost entirely into the deep white space where color practically disappears from the edges, almost like entering Doug Wheeler’s “infinity room” of white light and nothingness.

This series’ title and it’s individual painting titles, such as “Every day is a good day” and “Neptune’s girlfriend” translate the work’s embodiment of zen notions of the here and now.  Like a Robert Ryman painting or a Jon Zurier, this work sits quietly and demands only a deep breath. Trautwein has dual sets of work in his practice. His drawings and video works (some of which he calls hypertexts) with line drawings and doodles, sound and his signature “time sheets” (recycled letter sized paper) sublimate nervous energy and illuminate randomness and chaos as they satirize politics, technology, and as the artist says,”perpetually reoccurring human folly.” His paintings provide an escape to the calm and serenity of the present moment.  The viewer finds their own meaning in confronting these minimal paintings.