Relics (Relics I), 1987
This striking watercolor comes across as a sombre dystopia of the Western world.
A dramatic scene unfolds before our eyes. Two figures, a man and a woman, are sinking in a watery environment and trying to free themselves from it. The male figure, contorted in pain, stretches one cramped hand above the waterline and holds on to a long cloth with the other. Immediately beside him, the female figure spreads her arms wide as if she is surrendering to the inevitable. Her mouth is open, her eyes gaze fixedly upward. What are they trying to escape from? What is causing them pain?
The couple are obviously undergoing a process of transformation, for they no longer appear human but are rather like strangers in their own skin. Their ribs shimmer through their muscular bodies, which seem to dissolve in the lower section of the picture. The bands of fabric tethering themselves around the bodies like creepers are reminiscent of the lengths of cloth used as burial shrouds for the dead. The male figure’s characteristic posture recalls the central figure of the famous Laocoön Group, in which Laocoön seeks to free himself from coiling sea serpents. His screaming head is widely known in art history, since this ancient marble group is where the “heightened moment” was depicted for the first time. Baumgarte contrasts this unique moment with a timeless moment of the passive female figure, who remains in the posture of the dead Christ of medieval Pietà groups. Diverse temporal planes thus come together in this work, reinforcing the impression that the motif represents a vision.
Pure colors, which usually determine the color scheme of Baumgarte’s works, have completely receded here. Instead, the image is dominated by a spectrum of secondary colors, with green, orange, and violet creating an unpleasant, toxic effect and emphatically underscoring the transition of the two figures from a living to a dead state.
Baumgarte may have provided a clue at the upper edge of the picture in the form of an old oil can lying away from the water in a yellow-orange space that seems to be on fire. This work thus alludes in a symbolically exaggerated way both to the oil price crisis of 1986 and to the fire in a warehouse belonging to the Sandoz chemical factory in Basel, as a result of which water contaminated with pesticides entered the Rhine and triggered an environmental disaster.