The great Erdelmeier Feeling
by Professor Peter Weiermair
translated by Anna Gelderman
In spite of the enormous changes in an artistīs media, the stretching of
boundries to include music, speech, dance and theatre, one medium has
remained relevant throughout (in fact exhibitions and anthologies
worldwide testify to its currently increasing importance); that is drawing.
Even in the heyday of conceptual art the drawing had its place as a
recorder of ideas, emphazising the closeness between drawing and
writing. In general drawing is one of several media open to an artist;
artists who use it practicaly exclusively are in the minority. One of these is
Erdelmeier, a thoroughbred drawer, a virtuoso of line. Even with brush
in hand he remains faithful to the line. Erdelmeier takes drawing
idioms from all over the world and integrates them into his
vocabulary: graffiti from public buildings, caricatures, Japanese mangas,
science-fiction comics, innstruction manual drawings, and political posters.
He mixes styles and themes like a musician, weaving them into an
unmistakeable whole that covers the range from the most intimate pianissimo to
the most powerful opera.
His drawings, often covering an entire wall, combine Agitprop and Polke,
biomorphic transformation of gratuitously copulating bodies and the polymorphic
sexual asthetic ā la Bellmer with the rawness of Peter Saulīs
Witzzeichnungen; newspaper, advertisement and handbook drawings with
Punch and Judy, utopian stellar beings emerge from galaxies, enormous
graffitti dissolve elegantly and their impulsive, energetic lines entangle
themselves in a completely new story. Erdelmeier conducts a viewer into
a kind of visual ecstasy that I have called The great Erdelmeier Feeling;
transmitting as it does the very breath of a storyteller, the very energy of
these lines, the very core of the stories that we can never get enough of
because they are all parts of an overall story that never comes to an
end.
These drawings can talk, scream, whisper, scold, gasp, even stay silent
when the line just finishes without leading to anything. They represent the
monolog of a storyteller who takes everything the day brings, digests it,
and spits it out again. Erdelmeierīs atelier (a former storeroom in the old
FfM police headquarters waiting to be demolished)is the perfect backdrop
for these mountainous stacks of drawings, drawings of a gifted storyteller, not an illustrator, one of the great, ruling the line like a magician,
controling it like a virtuoso, that flowing, flying line, taking up the thread of a
story, condensing into an object, then transforming into something else,
all in the twinkling of an eye.