by M. Sebastian Araujo · Hemlock House, VT / Images Courtesy of Joerg Dressler
I HAVE BEEN LOOKING AT JOERG DRESSLER’S WORK FOR YEARS NOW.
Enough of it, that I thought I knew the register he worked in — the atmospheric distances, the landscapes that seemed to be dissolving even as you looked at them, the sense that impermanence was always the real subject no matter what sat in the foreground. What’s stayed with me longest, though, isn’t a landscape at all. Years ago Dressler made a body of work called; The Idioms Project — German idioms translated back into English word for word, then created literally.
Der Apfel fällt nicht weit vom Stamm /The apple does not fall far from the tree
A few of those pieces now live in the permanent collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum. I’ve never stopped thinking about how much nerve that takes — building a digital image on the gap between what a phrase says and what it means and trusting the viewer to feel the space between the two without you spelling it out. This new body of work does not abandon any of that instinct.
It just lets something alive walk into the frame, and the whole picture changes with it.
A CAT MID-YAWN, RINGED IN DAHLIAS. A star cut into the landscape behind it — Dressler himself won’t say whether it reads as a wound or a window, and I don’t think he wants to settle it. He never has. That’s the same gap the idiom paintings lived in, just with the words removed and the image left to carry the double meaning on its own. Elsewhere, two pointers rise chest-deep out of a green wave of foliage, ringed in fruit and roses, a black abstract shape swallowing half the sky above them like a spill that hasn’t decided what it’s spilling into. These are not quiet paintings. Ask Dressler what he’s chasing and he won’t give you one word for it. “I would say it’s a myriad of feelings that I’m after,” he told me, “curiosity, serenity, wonder, joy, mystery, and so on.” A sense of duality, he says, runs through nearly everything he makes — representation and abstraction held in the same frame, refusing to resolve into one language.
THE CONSTRUCTION ITSELF HAS CHANGED, NOT JUST THE SUBJECT. Look closely at these new pieces and the star, the negative-space silhouettes cut into the picture plane, aren’t painted illusions of depth — they’re built up, layered, closer to relief or collage than to a flat canvas pretending at dimension. A dog-shaped void interrupts a field of pink peonies; a butterfly-shaped panel sits recessed into a green ground. Dressler has always worked with a palette knife’s worth of built-up surface, but this mixed-media turn — panel against panel, cutout against paint — does something his earlier landscapes didn’t: it gives the work an actual, physical sense of motion. You’re not just looking at implied movement in a brushstroke. You’re looking at a picture plane that has literally shifted, layers pulling apart from each other, and that structural restlessness reads as its own kind of energy — kinetic in a way his more purely atmospheric work never quite was.
TRAINING CAME FIRST, LONG BEFORE ANY OF THIS. Dressler was born in Hanau, Germany, and started painting at thirteen. He earned his MFA at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach in 1994, with a guest semester at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris along the way, and left Germany for the United States in 1996. He has painted from the American coast since — Provincetown in summer, Miami Beach the rest of the year — and his visual vocabulary has always drawn from a wide cross-section of art history: Romanticism, Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, graphic design, photography. None of it sits as a single influence. All of it sits at once.
THE ANIMALS THEMSELVES ARE THE REAL DEPARTURE. Dressler’s landscapes have always carried a charge of impermanence, fragility, the passage of time — memento mori, more or less, even when he wasn’t naming it that directly. What’s new is who’s standing inside that fragility now, fully alive. “At the core of this new work is the importance of companionship,” he told me, “the profound connections between species, built on trust, unconditional love, and shared presence.” He’s after the opposite instinct now. Memento vivere. Remember life. “The older I get,” he said, “the more I find myself in need of memento vivere — something animals seem to practice much more instinctively than we humans do.”
THE FLOWERS ARE DOING A DIFFERENT JOB THAN THE BACKGROUND. The dahlias and roses in this work are almost hyperreal, rendered petal by petal, while the space behind them stays soft, unresolved, atmospheric. That’s not a stylistic tic. “My goal is always to create a sense of space and depth in my work,” Dressler said — the sharp foreground is simply honest about what the eye can and can’t hold at a distance, and the blurred background gives the viewer somewhere to rest when the detail in front of them gets to be too much.
A CRITIC ONCE WROTE THAT DRESSLER PLACES TRANQUILITY BESIDE VIOLENCE. Christopher Busa, in Provincetown Arts, described his work as light clashing with dark, fragility set beside boldness — forces that seem summoned on a whim but land with real force. That tension is still the engine here, even with a cat yawning in the middle of it. What Dressler wants recognized, above the tension, is the hand behind it: mark-making that shifts from broad and physical to narrow and exact, worked over until nothing feels rushed. “Each painting’s execution is carefully considered and thoughtfully developed,” he said, “rather than rushed.”
THIS ISN’T A PIVOT SO MUCH AS A HOMECOMING WITH COMPANY. For the past four years, Dressler’s still lifes have hovered over seascapes — a distinct enough body of work that this new direction might look, from outside, like a break. He doesn’t see it that way. “This new work is a culmination of many things that have come before,” he told me. He’s returning to landscape without dropping the still-life vocabulary he spent four years building, letting the two modes share the same canvas the way his representational and abstract instincts always have. “I see the earlier and more recent work speaking to each other,” he said, “simply by documenting my journey and development as an artist.”
I KEEP THINKING ABOUT HOW MUCH ENERGY THESE NEW PIECES HAVE COMPARED TO WHAT I REMEMBER FROM HIS EARLIER SHOWS. It isn’t louder color or busier compositions doing that work — it’s the physical layering, the sense that a panel could shift under your eye if you looked at it long enough, paired now with something genuinely alive holding still at the center of all that motion. That’s a hard balance to strike, and I’m not sure I’ve seen him strike it quite this way before
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WHERE TO SEE IT. This new work is on view now through August 20th at Alden Gallery in Provincetown, where Dressler is represented alongside Rivalry Projects in Buffalo. His paintings are held in the permanent collections of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University.
The Magpie Chronicles is written from Hemlock House, Vermont, by M. Sebastian Araujo. If this found you — share it.