Excerpt from an interview with Alexandra Grubeck, 2023
A: Why ghosts, dear Ronald Kodritsch? Why do you paint ghosts?
R: To be honest, I don’t know how this motif came about. It came suddenly, like most of the things I paint. In order to find a new motif, or any motif at all, I first free myself from figuration and try to get close to something through abstract colour composition. Something I don!t even know yet and I even don!t want to know. At best, the spontaneously applied streaks of colour condense into a concrete subject.
A: How can you imagine that?
R: At first I start abstractly and at some point the motif is found, it has developed. The longer I deal with one and the same motif, the more abstract it becomes. The motif dissolves, it turns into its own. I paint and stop thinking. Then it’s about painting problems on a canvas and it’s a permanent struggle, an intuitive struggle. I make mistakes and many good paintings have resulted from failure, because I!m not able to put it into practice. It often turns out to be something completely different. From time to time it doesn!t work at all and the way to the garbage can is pre-painted.
A: Why the series „Geist auf Couch“?
R: A ghost never sleeps. So I think it’s absolutely legitimate that a ghost rests up, isn’t it? I’ve been painting ghosts in different constellations and variations for a long time. So it wasn’t a total surprise when such a character suddenly took a seat on a couch. We were interested in each other, and played with each other. Furthermore it’s about minimal shifts, foreground, background and the setting, lying down, placing this amorphous figure on its base – in this case the couch. The ghosts mean reduced, almost human forms to me, that carry out certain activities, such as lying. However, as I said, I didn’t choose that.
A: In what way?
R: Since the motif has painted itself. In principle, I like to work in series and some motifs are suitable and others are not. The series consist of themes and variations and these variations are dealt with and will be advanced and shaped until it somehow fits, until I think I have understood it.
A: So what might the viewers understand?
R: When I look at the pictures now, I think to myself that Freud has taken a seat on his own couch and is doing self-analysis, looking the viewer of the picture in the eye.
A: Whereby, your pictures already reveal something for the viewer. Especially through the titles and serial titles, e.g. “Geist auf Couch” or “Bastards”. You usually use very explicit titles that are then repeated in some form. With “Bikinimädchen” the imagination starts before you’ve actually seen it. For me that is an outstanding quality in your work. At first glance, individual aspects could sometimes be taken as a joke. You often have to at least smile and sometimes it can be a tightrope walk. A bit of everyday comedy and situational comedy. It’s obviously much more complex, since you combine a lot formally, but also because you combine the formal with the content so well, I think.
R: In principle, I’m for sure happy when I find subjects that are not quite predominant in art history. Whether it’s “Bikinimädchen” or “Schispringer” or whatever. It is not my motivating force to think to myself: My God, now I have to do something that has not yet been tackled in the large field of painting. Still it is a nice side effect.
A: Despite everything, the ghosts are a bit calmer, less explicitly formulated than for example “Bastards”. Is it because it’s about ghosts, since it’s such an immaterial thing?
R: Probably yes. It has to do with a formal reduction. To me it is important to depict something with only a few elements. So, although the eyes of the ghosts often consist of only two points, I try to bring something like an expression or a mood into the ghost’s face. A: Does such a ghost have a gender?
R: Partly, yes, but they have to tied it up. Something like that didn’t grow naturally. That’s not possible, is it? A ghost is basically sexless.
A: As we know.
R: However, I’m not so sure about that either.
A: Do your ghosts generally want to have a gender?
R: Some want to and then they first have to make an effort to get one.
A: How do you become a ghost?
R: It had all started with my grandmother, who told me ghost stories. She grew up on a farm and had to work hard as a child. The farmers on the farm did spiritualistic sessions in the evening more or less for fun. Since there was no TV, they sat around a table and questions were answered with knocks: once for yes and twice for no. Suddenly the table had moved and began to go up to the first floor of the house or lost souls” were manifesting in other ways. My grandmother had told me that when I was a little boy. Her final sentence usually was: “And if that’s not true, then I’ll drop dead now.” In the ghost stories I read, the last sentence was like: Strange, but that’s how it’s written.