The Galerie Elisabeth & Reinhard Hauff is pleased to present the first solo show Bilder der dämmernden Welt by French artist Arthur Metz (*1988 in Lyon, France). The painter studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart from 2017 to 2022 and lives and works in Alsace.

Metz is a passionate admirer of the painters, subjects and techniques of 19thcentury German Romanticism. But he is also intensely moved and fascinated by today's young generation's search for orientation in a threatening world, and by the way young people yearn for safety and retreat in an idyllic wholesome nature constantly and massively threatened in today's world. The contradiction between youthful, unrestrained hedonism, thoughtless littering and political activism which we experience now everywhere, finds expression in his works, in depictions of party night life, with its ectases and abysses. Metz says about his current work:

"The images and the title of this exhibition also take their origin in my admiration of many of the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. I am deeply impressed by their great expressive power – despite the seemingly simplicity of the means – and have along the way realized how much they have in common with works close to my heart – those of German Romanticism. Here, I have painted scenes of everyday life in an interactive world, and I wanted to charge these scenes with the same melancholy that seeps through many ukiyo-e works. My intention is to depict the moral state of an era caught between desire for pleasure and fear of the future. This I do with before-and-after images: the cheerful and fabulous party in the evening, and the littered lawns of the festival grounds the following morning. Such an image is strangely comparable to that of a refugee camp. The image of a bustling full pub is contrasted with a girl alone in the dark in front of her screen, and a house in the middle of nature – where many intend or hope to escape the city and all that goes with it, such as stress, endless commuting, and pollution.
Parallel to these themes, there are allegorical representations. The violent storm in Corsica last summer becomes a Fukushima-like tsunami that soon hits carefree vacationers, a nuclear power plant, and nearby towns. From a critical front cover picture of the Bild newspaper showing the black bloc at the violent protests during the G20 summit in Hamburg with the sentence «Nobody stops the leftist hate», I personally want to turn the media narrative around, and give a positive picture of a defiant youth standing up for its future. Young protesters obviously understand that progress and common good are not achieved without effort and fight. Especially today, when time is scarce and politics are errant. To me, at least, a fighting spirit seems more productive than eco-anxiety. This even though youthful engagement remains for a good part useless, misleading and desperate.
For me, these images are another step in the quest to revive the strength of feeling of the Romantic, in order to use it as a relevant expression of the Zeitgeist."

Text: Arthur Metz and Reinhard Hauff, translation into English: Elisabeth Hauff.

We cordially invite you to our opening on Friday, May 26, 2023, from 6 to 9 p.m.