PSYCHO.
ROBERT LUCANDER
AND ENA SWANSEA

At the end of this year, the Sammlung Falckenberg will bring together seemingly poetic-surrealist images by US painter Ena Swanser and subversive-enigmatic works by Finnish artist Robert Lucander who now lives in Berlin.

The exhibition’s title of “Psycho” is a reference to the eponymous horror classic by Alfred Hitchcock and calls to mind the disturbed nature of schizophrenics, psychopaths and other psychologically disturbed persons. “Psycho” is Greek for “soul” and the term referring to insanity is derived from the notion that a human’s spirit or soul can become ill; psychoanalysis, for example, is used to treat deep-rooted psychological traumata and behavioral disorders. Bret Easton Ellis’ novel “American Psycho” exposed, for example, the ugly face of unquestioning materialism but left the reader in doubt as to whether the gruesome scenes depicted in the novel emanate from the protagonist’s psychotic fantasies or whether he actually carries out these excessively violent acts. Colloquially, “psycho” is used to describe a mentally disturbed person who displays behavioral problems and a tendency towards aggressive conduct, thus having an unsettling and threatening effect on their environment. The use of this term leads one to expect a confrontation with art that takes non-conformism, insanity and thus the threatening and the sinister as its theme.

Both the ephemeral-psychological character of Ena Swansea’s paintings and the analytically fragmentary nature and media alienation as manifested in works by Robert Lucander, serve to unsettle the beholder somehow. Both artists upset our viewing patterns, create a subtle feeling of discomfort and expose either one’s own or social reality as “insane”.