No self lasts forever.
Will I ever be like the others? Does the length of the Milky Way separate my mother self from my old self? Can the mermaid walk the day after tomorrow? Will you show me your pictures, Lou Hoyer, or will you only show them to the dead rabbits?
If we call the world reality, then the reality of an individual consists of many surrealisms. The construction of a psyche, the life story of an ego, can only differ from others, thus becoming essential, by building up surrealistic peculiarities. These are fantastically realistic for the self, which in turn questions the whole reality of the world.
Lou Hoyer’s pictorial worlds are part of contemporary surrealism. Pregnant women whose egos split up. A father, naked and on all fours, grows horse ears as he brings his children to safety from the apocalyptic sea. A rain of fire blows around his ankles. A reptilian mermaid breastfeeds several babies, with breasts growing out of her curls and her bottom. Under a motorway bridge, a woman with a branch growing through her cheek touches her friend’s behind.
In the exhibition, The Utopia of Others, Lou Hoyer presents five large-format charcoal drawings and twelve smaller pastel works on paper. «Theatre amid life» is how René Magritte described his paintings in 1928, which provided a stage for a life where physics played by a different set of rules. In Lou Hoyer’s works, life is captured in the middle of the theatre. Sometimes, all it takes is a climax, a fertilisation. In her cosmos, mermaids circle, as restricted in their movements on land as mothers caring for their babies and children. Mythological, ethereal transformations come roaring in. When people become parents, animalistic traits drive them like a dagger. Not only does the carrying of their children become part of their anatomy.
Furious defence and love muscles do too. In Vanishing Point, a father plays with his children. He is a horse. It is one of the oldest games known to mankind. But maybe he has to hurry. Perhaps the apocalypse is not far away. Drama floods into the picture, into this primal game. When flames and fire fall onto the sea and are not extinguished, art history recognises this phenomenon as God’s punishment, doom, and nightmare. The drama of being a father and mother shakes the inner scaffolding and exposes all truths. Never is one so confronted with one’s true self, with one’s abysses as well as with one’s best surrealisms. The pregnant women who distort, double, and multiply—are they not a hyper-reality of the inner distortion that a woman undergoes in nine months? Formally, of course, but also in the construction of their ego. No self lasts forever, even if that is always promised.
Her smaller pastel drawings are colourfully filled. Each picture is like a daydream or rather a melancholic dystopian dream. Are they reality after all? Forests on fire, climate crises. Wastelands behind motorways. Grey emptiness under road bridges. Red figures like genies without bottles. Women grow fish in their abdomens.
The ghostly pregnant women in the large black-and-white pictures are self-portraits of the artist. She held printed photos in front of a mirror foil and tilted them until the distortion was long enough. She then photographed the resulting image again and transferred it by hand into a large format.
Lou Hoyer seeks intense contact with the paper. Thousands of lines and strokes are applied with charcoal, requiring full physical effort in front of the studio wall. Despite the undulating and psychological nature of her themes, Hoyer restricts herself in her tools: no color, just black and white. The charcoal makes various noises when it hits the paper—it can squeak or make a dull thud. There are no soft movements, as with a brush. The picture is combed through like a horse, groomed with pressure that stimulates the underlying blood circulation, with a stroke that knows what it wants but is by no means cold. On the contrary, it heats up. The charcoal receives friction.
The large formats demonstrate transparency. Every stroke is retraced by the viewer; no pictorial element can be embellished with colour or saved by overpainting. Lou Hoyer lays herself bare. Nothing distracts from the truth of each line. Only an artist with exceptional skill can afford to do this, and very few can. Lou Hoyer’s drawing ability is predestined for this.
Meret Oppenheim covered a cup service with straw-like fur—an embodiment of modern surrealism. With Lou Hoyer, the external distortion of the structure and the questioning of the object become an aesthetic visual language that defines the figures’ bodies from within. A fur-like skin grows like a biological anamorphosis, becoming a living form.
Standing close to her large charcoal drawings, one may forget the motif. The images are composed of lines, loops, and strokes, each so dynamic and characteristic that they could also lead an autonomous life as abstract works.
In Going Nowhere there are scribbles in the background—»M’s» and «A’s»—as if from a child’s hand calling for its mother. Elsewhere, free lines and scribbles appear as if from expressionism. In Curled Up a foot is depicted that could easily stop being a foot. Instead, it becomes a gestural organism, a world of its own. Lou Hoyer gives her lines freedom, even though she draws figuratively. Her lines also express her unique, surrealistic self.