Ernst Volland

Game or Escape - Prints and books
March 11 – April 19, 2023

In the years following April 25, 1974, the German artist and curator Ernst Volland (1946, Bürgstadt/Miltenberg) closely followed the effervescence of Portuguese artistic manifestations after the long years of dictatorship. 

Also fruit of his complicit friendship with the British painter based in Lisbon, David Evans, he organized a first and important exhibition in Germany that brought together works by some of the most active artists in this period. He called it “Portugiesische Realisten” and brought together works by Virgílio Domingues, David Evans, Eduardo Batarda, João Abel Manta, Eduardo Nery, Rolando Sá Nogueira, Rogério Ribeiro, Henrique Ruivo, Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos, Rocha de Sousa, Vasco and Marcelino Vespeira . From this event in 1977, a catalog was published that remains today an important testimony, just as in the previous year he had also edited in Germany, under his guidance, the book Portugal- ein schwieriges Problem - Joao Abel Manta - Politische Karikaturen und Plak, this time bringing together the graphic work of a political nature by João Abel Manta.

Ernst Volland, himself a restless drawer committed to criticizing oppressive policies and pointing out, with sharpness and humour, the contradictory fluctuations of societies and the complex relationships between people, has edited throughout his career several books where he gives expression to his languages , from cartoon to collage, from freer drawing to intervention on pre-existing photographic images. More recently, he has explored the possibilities of digital technologies, above all as a way of making his original work circulate.

With the present exhibition of multiples by Ernst Volland, Tinta nos Nervos evokes this fruitful encounter with Portugal and Portuguese art, this time hosting a recent set of digital prints executed from works carried out in the last decades, numbered and dated by the author, as well as a group of edited books, revealing the artist's political and social concerns over time and his indomitable desire to make images accessible to a greater number of people.



A “PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY”

By David Evans


“Bombarded every day by terrible images of war, hunger, sickness, climatic catastrophes of our own making, we have become insensitive and numbed to their impact - partly for our own survival and mental health. 

In this exhibition which he calls “Spiel oder Flucht” Ernst Volland takes photographic images many of which are tragic records of human folly and reworks them using the traditional techniques of the artist: colouring-obliterating-eliminating-emphasising-blurring to challenge the spectator to look afresh at uncomfortable visual memories which have been hidden away and buried deep in our psyches. The transformation process is Volland’s way of breathing new life into images which he feels are as relevant to us today as they were when they were first made. It is also a vehicle of appropriation- with aesthetic as well as social and political aims. 

Ernst Volland has always been fascinated by photographs and the way they can be manipulated and exploited. As a young artist he made and published posters and postcards using photomontage techniques in which irreverent humour and satire were used to question and criticise the political establishment and the cornerstones on which it was based. It was Volland´s creativity and his political independence which made his work so effective as a critique of society. In maturity his work has evolved to take on a Goya-like gravitas which has broadened its impact and appeal whilst demanding more from the spectator who is invited to lower his/her defences and to take sides in the different conflicts and tragedies he portrays.

The Tinta nos Nervos Gallery is to be congratulated on yet another exceptional show- by an artist who deserves to be better known in Portugal- almost half a century since he first exhibited in Lisbon..

Lisboa, February 2023”

Ernst Volland

Germany -  Bürgstadt/Miltenberg, 1946

“Ernst Volland’s images are the work of a smuggler. This is a name for an honorable man who does not commit fraud and burglary but skillfully acts as a contrabandist transporting goods over boundaries against prohibition. From the 19thcentury on, we know smugglers who transport signs and ideas between different worlds, from art to photography, from images to words, and from language to imagined pictures. Volland’s pictures are extensions of the activities of 19thcenturycontrabandista with visual means of the present. With the smuggling of prohibited goods they have in common the transgression of boundaries and the intentional breaking of rules.

Art with a political message has become unpopular and has lost its place in current public discourse. In order to maintain political commitment in the arts, camouflage is required and ways are needed that hide the political, making it possible at the same time to spread its message. Volland’s contra band hides ideas in distorted visuality. He transforms the fuzzy image to a means of subversive communication transgressing the dividing lines that separate the comical and the serious, commitment and distance, political message and pure joke. These image move between montage that since Eisenstein, Höch and Heartfield has always political, and the surrealist experiment reaching to the subconscious and the world of dreams. These pictures glide from documenting into the play of imagination. Blurring pictures serves as an artistic means of smuggling the political into the aesthetics of art. Volland also uses children’s color crayons to draw pictures that hide political themes in pseudo child art. This is a deliberate alienation aiming at enlightening adult viewers.”


Prof. Dr. Bernd Hüppauf