Sometimes it is only by deliberately absenting himself that Jonas Lipps can allow his paintings to come into being. He abandons a situation that has become normality, and imagines another. His studio is transformed into an office or a classroom, and his table becomes a desk, at which he sits hunched over an exercise. In some of his pictures, he invents the person who has given him this exercise. Such a readiness to absent oneself from oneself, that is, to stop being the person you think you are, can be a precondition to making art that accesses the unknown. Since Lipps is not exactly inclined to make things easy for himself, the process is even more complex. The playful act of expanding to become someone else also involves placing oneself under a constraint. The avatars that Lipps invents as mediums for himself are all limited to the format of the writing table. This is a dialectic of restriction and expansion. The back-and-forth means that Lipps’ art never comes across as loud and conceited, but nor does he approach its subject with an excessive modesty. His works are too mysterious for that, and his themes never pleasant enough. And what is mysterious, or rather enigmatic, stems from those tensions we find compelling: looking at Lipps‘ paintings, we get the irresistible sense that there is a story behind what we see: it hints tantalisingly at its presence, while keeping itself out of sight. Sometimes it feels like a joke whose punchline, though ambiguous, exists nevertheless. Lipps also conforms to no (consistent) style which might, over time, offer some kind of key to his works.

The pictures produced through this complex principle of production reveal nothing and resolve nothing. Instead, their visual inventions startle us, leaving everything wide open. Behind their motifs stand all manner of impulses. Sometimes they are based on the artist’s own experiences; had these memories not been fictionalised, the paintings would have an almost documentary character. An example would be the drawing O.T. (Tschäpe-Schleuse) (O.T. (Tschäpe Lock)), which shows couples in boats travelling along a canal. Figures on the bank are opening the locks for them; they wear long, ecclesiastical robes, as if they were priests operating a production line of funerals for the couples. The painting is based on Lipps’ fondest holiday memory, a trip by canoe through the Spree Forest south of Berlin, which was already a popular destination in East German times. Apparently teenagers will let you through the locks for fifty cents. The question arises: is this the name of a real lock on the canal? Or is Lipps alluding to Beate Zschäpe, the far right extremist who was born in East Germany?

The drawing is governed by a strict arrangement of lines and fields of colour. The elongated horizontal format gives a sense of movement from left to right, allowing a narrative to unfold as on a cinema screen. Formally speaking, canals function as conduits between containers where liquids are stored. Thinking of the picture surface as a container is a useful way of getting round some of the difficulties of composition. The artist relieves himself of the pressure of having to keep making decisions by filling certain parts of it with liquid, and every now and then topping them up again, like a petrol-pump attendant. By stoically filling in fields of colour, a transition to painting can be achieved. For even though Lipps‘ pictures are generally categorised as drawings, this classification is not always accurate. And not only because he uses thicker, more opaque, paint alongside watercolour and pencils. Many of the pictures are produced not so much from lines as from painterly methods.

Again and again, we find the picture space determined by rigorous sequences. They lend a dynamism to the compositions, and their repetition gives it structure. Queues of people, snakes, rows of houses, vehicles that transport the queues of people. These are motifs that keep reappearing; they lend the picture’s static elements the appearance of movement, catching the viewer’s eye and getting it to follow these sequences. This sequential element asserts an order. Thus for example, in the picture with a row of houses composed of coloured cubes, reminiscent of a town from a Western film, an optician’s is surrounded by seven nursery schools with names such as ‘Ev. Kindergarten Erlöser’ (‘Evangelical Kindergarten of the Redeemer’) or ‘Kreativitätskita Hugenottenhof’ (‘Huguenot Court Creative Nursery’). Is this intended as satire? Or wishful thinking? Institutes of learning are a recurrent source of interest for Lipps, partly because they produce genres such as ‘what I liked most about my holiday’, and partly because of the repressive mechanisms that are associated with all educational institutions. Art and homework can resemble each other very closely; both involve fulfilling tasks and expectations. There is a fine line between autonomy and heteronomy.

Lipps deliberately subjects himself to rules that automatise his productive processes. Something is specified, only for it to be repeated; it could be a colour sequence, or a composition that seems to reproduce itself. The issue is one of finding processes that can help one escape oneself. Or to put it another way: one’s own constraints are removed by external constraints. At some point, however, these self-imposed rules relinquish themselves, and let themselves be carried away by pure chance. When something threatens to become manic, the need to dissolve can kick in. Several of the pictures testify to what can happen when the sequences, having become compulsive, start to disintegrate: once they’ve lost their cohesion, many of their elements immediately arrange themselves into pairs again; others produce their own doubles, like single-celled organisms under the microscope. And sometimes it only seems possible to bring about a dissolution by exercising a certain amount of force. The picture entitled Das volle Gewicht (The Full Weight) is made expressive by its gestural painting. Green aliens land and hoist a pennant. From above there hangs a curtain inscribed with a list of years; it bears down upon the picture like the weight of passing years. The ‘higher beings’ aren’t bothered by it; unlike in Sigmar Polke’s famous work, they no longer issue any ‘commands’, but simply slip under the curtain and burst into the space beyond.