The Tex Avery Syndrome – ‘Pulling Teeth’, Brock Lindow
(official music video)
from the debut album ‘Origin’, 2019
Key Aspects
++++large-sized black & white drawings, films and objects, dealing with themes like future, women, death and the unknown.
PAR(L) (Post-Apocalyptic Romanticism (or Love)
Daniel Hartlaub’s work is often a composition of large-sized black & white drawings, films and objects, dealing with themes like future, women, death and the unknown.
I guess one of the reason why I tend to print out the drawings big and hang them up on huge walls is cause I like to think of them as backdrops in or of a film or in like a theater play. Often I set up performances throughout the exhibition to fill my work with a moving and physical narrative. Of course, also the visitors become involuntary actors of this narrative. Within this context I am always trying to let the location of where the exhibition takes place, its history and architecture, be part of the story of my work.
I am also trying to question or experiment with the medias film and drawing.
…this slow burning feeling of living in a world which is invisibly killing us or has already exceeded the point of no return.
Post-Apocalyptic Romanticism (or Love)
The idea to this term came up a couple of years ago while hanging out with a friend at this shut down nuclear power plant nearby Frankfurt. The whole set-up of the scenery, the brutalist architecture of the plant situated in the most beautiful natural environment, couldn’t express in a better way what´s it like to be living in this bizarre, beautiful and fucked-up world of today.
A reality, I am trying to render in my work.
Shortly before this trip I developed a new drawing-technic which, I think, fits well into the whole idea of PAR(L) (Post- Apocalyptic Romanticism (or Love)): before I start drawing I always blacken out the white sheet of paper with charcoal. Once all the “whiteness” (the light) has gone my mind is sufficiently empty to come up with forms and objects which I then erase out of the blackness and thus bring light into the darkness.
Since I am drawing like this digitally, the result not only is a drawing but also a film of the process/development of the drawing (the drawing-app I am working with records every drawing move/step I make on the screen). Since I am also a filmmaker this lets me combine the two things in a rather unusual but very enjoyable kind of way.
I guess with my work I am also trying to question or experiment with the medias film and drawing.
With Covid19 hitting into the present reality the term PAR(L) and what it stands for gets an unexpected update which makes the originally partly ironic partly serious meaning of it more real then ever: this slow burning feeling of living in a world which is invisibly killing us or has already exceeded the point of no return.
I don’t really know yet what that means for my work…
Artist’s Bio
Daniel Hartlaub is a German artist based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach, Germany and at St Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, England. He has lived and worked as an independent filmmaker and draughtsman (Graphic Novels, Black Drawings) in Frankfurt, New York and Barcelona. Hartlaub is also active as an actor and performer and is co-founder of the Frankfurter KunstSäule.
His films, drawings and performances have been exhibited and shown at the Museum of Applied Art, Frankfurt, Museum of Communication (Luminale 2016), Frankfurt, Nassauischen Kunstverein Wiesbaden, 1822 Forum, Frankfurt Germany, Off-Frieze, London, New York International Film and Video Festival, Raindance London, Chicago Underground Film Festival
www.frankfurter-kunstsaeule.de
https://www.instagram.com/daniel_hartlaub
mail@danielhartlaub.com.
Daniel Hartlaub:
Amabie, iPad Drawing, 2021