2024

auf Anfrage zugänglich

Haus für Kinder, Korbmacherweg 20, 81249 München

Acrylfarbe auf Beton, 3,5 x 40 m

Architecture: Christoph Maas Architekturbüro GmbH, München

Landscape architecture: mk.landschaft, München

Photos: Henning Koepke

Text: Barbara Horvath

Fantasy, invention and imagination can create utterly novel things. The visualization of an idea begins with a line. Christian Schwarzwald explores the complexity of perception in networks of lines, dots, circles and color fields. With “SLANG,” an extensive wall painting created especially for the Haus für Kinder on Korbmacherweg in Munich, the Berlin and Vienna-based artist draws on a potentially ambiguous pun. Slang, the unconventional or ironic use of real or made up words not easily recognized by all facets of society, can ensure cohesion within a subculture or community. It is a jargon used not only by graffiti and street art artists; this kind of complex secret code can also be found on the playground.

“SLANG” invites children (and adults) to immerse themselves in a web, in an interplay of colors and shapes: over wobbly bridges into a lookout tower, from balancing acts to a slide bar on to the next tower; along a wooden ramp, grasping the climbing net, and finally sliding downhill, escaping the immersive cosmos of play. The hand of the homo ludens (Latin for “playing man”) is able to construct—in jest, in solemnity, in freedom and in pleasure—a multitude of future, but largely fictitious life forms and worlds.

An airbrush gun extends from Schwarzwald’s hand; it is connected to an imaginary world that stems from the artist’s memory. The network of lines, the overlapping areas of drawings and colors are applied directly onto the 40-meter-long concrete wall. The colors blend into one another like those of a rainbow. The delicate arrangements of floating traces captured on the concrete wall open up a three-dimensional ‘realm of signs’ for the jungle gym in front of it.

Drawing is an illusionary act: it creates and conjures, dazzles and transforms that which previously only existed virtually. Schwarzwald’s colorful chimeras depict a utopian idea. Composed of various visual elements, they create an illusion of reality. The human being, the child, can recognize in them trees, geological layers, animals, mythical creatures, monsters, vegetative forms of nature, the sea, clouds, a familiar face or a ghostly apparition. The variations and interpretations are endless. Each time anew, through the skillful use of shading, perspective and details, the artist’s vast mural creates a three-dimensional effect. The depiction is confusing and chaotic and simultaneously hypnotic.

Christian Schwarzwald’s approach questions what it means to  create order: How is the world ordered? Is our understanding of the universe invented in language, and how does a child begin to describe the world? The child grows up without knowing any order. Everything is the world to him or her. A line, a stroke can represent this or that, potentially containing everything. A child’s view of the world is indecisive, unfiltered and characterized by a primal anarchy. Gradually, children learn to differentiate, to see the world and, eventually, to divide things into right and wrong. It brings order to the disorder of thoughts.

According to Aleida Assmann, humans make their environment accessible not only using tools, but also through signs.  A person is not just a homo faber (a doer), but also a homo interpres (an interpreter) and thus able to “not only perceive and accept phenomena in the world, but also recognize them as signs and react to them with attempts at interpretation.”[1] Schwarzwald’s “wall of signs and lines” opens up a grandiose scope for interpretation, enabling the child (the human being) not only to see and process the world, but also to understand it. To recognize more in the drawing as well as in the things themselves than what is given at first glance can be seen as a “basic [human] anthropological disposition.”[2]

[1] Aleida Assmann, “Im Dickicht der Zeichen”, Berlin, 2015, p. 31
[2] Ibid, p. 33