GWENAËL RATTKE

CARGOS OCULTOS

OPENING RECEPTION:
THURSDAY, JUNE 19TH
6:00 - 8:00PM

EXHIBITION DATES:
JUNE 19 - AUGUST 9, 2025

SCROLL FOR EXHIBITION IMAGES

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present Cargos Ocultos its seventh solo exhibition with Berlin artist Gwenaël Rattke. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, June 19th from 6-8pm.

Cargos Ocultos (= hidden charges) is a vibrant, poetic, and existential meditation on the human experience. With his unmistakable dreamlike and layered imagery, Rattke’s nine paintings are a visual journey into the idea of trajectories, passage, and the effort to make peace with the past while looking towards the future.

The great Argentinian writer and chronicler Martin Caparrós asked the questions: “When does one end up realizing that one will not be someone else?”; “How does one know to be the person one is?” (1). Spanish writer and poet Álvaro Pombo, believes that fragility—in all forms— lies at the heart of our current collective experience and is the great theme of our contemporary world: fragility in the face of disease, loneliness, injustice, lack of security, and in the face of lost convictions and dreams (2). Rattke’s overlapping, kaleidoscopic paintings are subtle, yet penetrating reflections on all of these ideas. We forge our trajectories, plans and aspirations all while being vulnerable to unforeseen personal and global circumstances, political developments, and the complexities of life. So long as our individual trajectories are unpredictable and precarious, Rattke questions if perhaps acceptance of the uncertain nature of the path is an essential step to moving forward and finding passage “through.”

The artist made these works during the winter solstice in Berlin — a time and place almost devoid of any color and light at all. After years of working on paper and with paper, Rattke takes to canvas as a new support for his expressions, transferring his ideas with a fresh foundation. His electric canvases in keyed up colors combine found images with screen print, stencil, halftone color fields, airbrushed ink and gouache. They have “the torn away feel of urban wheat pastes rendering partial maps to other worlds, psychedelic ads for dystopian sci fi features” (3). Paths run in diagonals and zig-zags, in spirals—sometimes ascending, sometimes descending, at odd angles, sometimes ending up in blind spots and dead ends. Rattke creates an intentional impasse in the architecture of the work, but then uses bold, electric color as a point of passage and a means of exploring “a luminosity that slips aways too easily these days.” His canvases exist as metaphors for the interconnectedness of things—real, imagined, aspired, and past, present and future— and in their glow, guide the viewer towards “unexpected openings to slip through and evolve.”

Rattke’s work spans media from painting, collage, silkscreen, photography, xerox graphics and film. Rattke worked with collage for most of his teenage years producing DIY fanzines, flyers and graphics in the Berlin punk community. Rattke began his queer punk zine, Easily Grossed Out, in the early 1990's. Issues were initially published from Rennes, France, and then later from the U.S.A. The zine featured interviews with bands such as Christ on a Crutch and Capitalist Casualties. Rattke's collages works borrow from the visual codes of the 1960's and 1970's; the works are intricate, ornamental and excessive, and present "an imagined past fire with beauty and sexual freedom." Rattke's work has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, CA; Samek Art Museum, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; Participant Inc and Derek Eller Gallery, New York; Galerie Knoth & Krueger, Exile Projects and Arratia Beer, Berlin, Skol, Montreal; YYZ Artists' Outlet, Toronto and Romer Young Gallery San Francisco. Rattke is in the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Palm Springs Art Museum. He Graduated in Communication Studies (Film) from Concordia University, Montreal, in 1997. Rattke lives in West Berlin.

For more information, please contact Joey Piziali at joey@romeryounggallery.com or 415.550.7483

(1) Martin Caparrós, Antes que nada, Random House, 2024
(2) Álvaro Pombo, in an interview in El País, Madrid, April 2025
(3) Mark Taylor, SF/Arts Curator