SØR Rusche Collection - Passion – ONLINE ONLY

Auction

6 to 19 May 2020, 6pm CET

Two terms are closely connected with the word passion. The suffering and the passion. Suffering is rarely felt without passion and vice versa.

When we speak of suffering, in Christianity we usually associate it with Jesus' way of suffering, his suffering and death including crucifixion. However, the Passion story also reflects the absolute passion of Jesus towards God. It is only thanks to his total devotion to God that Jesus endures all the suffering and is redeemed at the end of the Passion.

Above all, the crown of thorns has become a synonym for Christ's passion. Another important arm of Christ is the wooden cross on which Jesus died. Both instruments of suffering are the only objects in the painting "Burden" by Zoltan Bela. And in spite of the absence of the body of Jesus, we immediately associate with the painting the story of the Passion.

Zoltan Bela uses the well-known symbolism and iconography to make something new out of it. The reinterpretation of the crucifixion, the sad end of Christ's passion, is very reduced, gets by without many details and still has a strong expressiveness.

Let us speak of the passion. If one feels passion in love, sooner or later one often feels suffering. Even our innermost drive, the sexual drive, is closely linked to passion. After all, passion is what makes us misunderstand the purely biological reproduction to something special, what we consider romantic and which, through the media, has a great significance in our everyday life. Passion is always what man seems to strive for in his sexual life. What constitutes the perfection of a love relationship. It is what makes the relationship exciting and valuable and no longer has any negative connotations. (In ancient philosophy, one still spoke of the control and moderation of passion and the fear of completely surrendering oneself to passion). If you give yourself completely to passion, you still run the risk of losing sight of reality. Passion then functions as a possessive emotion of the mind, as intoxication, which one tries to make permanent.

The one who perfectly embodies the play with passion and desire is, for example, the goddess and sorceress Circe, who in Greek mythology knows how to put Ulysses' companions out of action with her charm. It is not for nothing that the word "bewitch" (in German "bezirzen") is derived from her name.

Steve Viezens takes up the theme in his painting "Circe am Waldesrand" and transfers it to a contemporary painting. The passion culminates here in the lust of the men who fall for Circe. The faces of Ulysses' men "left" Ulysses' faces on the edge of the forest, Circe had transformed them into pigs. Undressed, the goddess waits in a seductive pose at the edge of the forest for new victims. Instead of a cup of bewitched drink, the young woman awaits with an innocent-looking rabbit earring and two braids, tied with pink ribbons. One thing in particular catches the eye of the observer: her very voluptuous breasts, which are virtually stretched out towards the next visitor and arouse desire. The unnaturalness of the body, coupled with the minimization of the face, reflects a contemporary fantasy world as we find it in pornography.

However, the word passion does not only refer to the subject of pain or love.

A passion is also felt by a collector or artist. The passion for collecting connects the collector with the passion of the artist to paint. Both activities often happen from the deepest inside. The drive to experience satisfaction through collecting is a similar challenge to the drive to express one's innermost self and to bring it to paper, canvas or any other medium. This is often associated with feelings of suffering. In the history of art we often know the artist in particular as a being marked by suffering.

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