Cornelius Völker is a painter – and has always wanted to be one. Even though the young man born in 1965 in Kronach, Franconia was rather alone during his studies at the Düsseldorf Academy. It was the early 90s: The New Wild Ones and their fierce painting had become outdated. Everyone was now looking at the photographer couple Becher and their class. Artist ascetic Gerhard Merz was also quite influential at the school. Völker, however, chose A. R. Penck as a teacher and later switched to Dieter Krieg, who had a significant impact on him.
Towards the end of his studies, he and four friends made a real feature film. He also occasionally works in other media: Photos have always accompanied his work. In addition, there are prints and drawings – they are created as preparatory or accompanying works to his paintings, which have always been at the center of it all for him.
In one of his very early series, Völker mashed adorable little putti on the canvas in 1996. With painted fly swatters, he attacked the little guys, pressing the grid structure of the murder instrument into their fleshy, soft bodies. However, the images from his "Puttiklatsch" series do not look like a brutal massacre at all – rather, they appear to be color battles. He once remarked that he wanted to make these lovely creatures of art history into what they were, "into color, into nothing but color."
In this respect, the rather small-format angel images seem to be significant. Much of what was essential here will remain so in Völker's work, which manages without jumps, breaks, and larger surprises and can assert its position well. The painter with studios in Düsseldorf and New York is successful, one can say. Since 2005, he has also been teaching as a professor at the Kunstakademie Münster. However, Völker is not a star. His painting has always moved along the fringes of trends, booms, and hypes that hold the art market in check and drive prices up.
Even when the New Leipzig School sparked renewed interest in painting at the beginning of the new millennium, Völker did not benefit. Perhaps because his paintings never tell a story. They have – quite unlike the works of his Leipzig colleagues – absolutely no narrative elements. Neither the tampons nor the tea bags, the ribbons and swimmers, the books, bellies, navels, flip-flops.
Völker usually presents these things in isolation, often against a smooth, completely neutral, sometimes almost artificially appealing color background. The motif is essentially a minor issue. Much more important seems to be the painting: The colors, the often virtuoso handling of the brush, also that peculiar coexistence, the sophisticated intertwining of object and abstraction.
Völker skillfully lets the transitions from one to another blur. One can observe this very well when he empties a trash can to scatter and slosh the contents with brush and paint oversized onto the snow-white canvas. Crumpled Haribo bags, squeezed oranges, something that looks like a piece of bacon. Cherries, half or completely crushed, along with the juice. In between, there are moldy clumps, brown crumbs, slimy green, liquid yellow. The concrete forms lose their composure, they dissolve into color. The color itself becomes the object.
