Thomas Cena

About the artist

The draughtsman and painter Thomas Cena captures urban fringe areas, urban undergrowth and ruderal areas in his silverpoint and charcoal drawings as well as his colour-reduced watercolour paintings on paper and canvas, focusing on forgotten and decaying architectural fragments, uncultivated agricultural landscapes or floral reclaimed areas. The appropriation and pictorial valorisation of these seemingly profane locations in his immediate surroundings, which nature is trying to take possession of and which seem to receive hardly any care, could certainly be seen as having a semi-romantic undertone. However, this is broken, there is no exaggeration or glorification of nature, but rather a kind of "nature research" that captures its power relations in a cultivated environment and reserves a space for the wild growth, the escapes. Cena's cautious gaze shows his sympathy for allowing natural processes to take place under "aggravated" conditions and, in doing so, unfolds a subtle poetry that is able to discover the "beauty of nature" in places where man has previously or continues to enclose or threaten the environment. Through the relative uniformity of a two-dimensional hatching, Cena transforms his landscapes, spotted and mottled, into a contradiction of contemporary timelessness. On closer inspection of the works, the depth of meaning of the "no man's land" gradually reveals itself after recognising the mastery of the craftsmanship, which does not deny its role models from the ranks of the French Impressionists, and offers the opportunity to engage with the vaguely symbolic and enigmatic nature of the subjects. In his first institutional solo exhibition in southern Germany under the ambiguous title "Aura", the artist focuses mainly on views of a particular landscape situation in the lowlands of Lower Saxony, on the Eilenriede, the largest inner-city woodland area in Europe, a 640-hectare remnant of medieval clearing phases in the centre of Hanover. Cena shows thickets and undergrowth, silting ponds and overgrown clearings, quasi remnants or near-natural quotations of the former so-called northern forest, which despite the background noise of the state metropolis can transform into idiosyncratic, elegiac places. However, the fact that he frequently, if not exclusively (as documented by "travel pictures" from Greece, Italy and Japan), devotes himself to his immediate surroundings, especially their scenic aspects, should not, as mentioned, be understood as a romanticised view of nature in his native climes, but also opens the view to the uncanny in the familiar, seeks its "exotic moment": against the homeliness of the familiar, Cena embarks on journeys of discovery into the neighbourhood. The Polish-born illustrator from Katowice answers the polemical question of whether he is interested in "home" laconically: "I'm not interested in home at all. I like to sit on the train in the direction of travel and look out of the window." Thomas Cena usually acquires the motifs for his works photographically and then transfers a selection to paper or canvas in his studio. This transfer of a topical examination of his personal environment into traditional design techniques is a further point of attraction that makes this oeuvre a worthwhile discovery.

Born in 1970 in Katowice (Poland) and moved to Germany in 1979, the artist studied painting at the Braunschweig University of Art and was a master student of Malte Sartorius. After a DAAD scholarship in Japan and two one-year living and working scholarships for painting in Stuhr and Northeim, Cena held a teaching position for the basics of painting at his former university from 2007 to 2015. He has been teaching art at a grammar school in Springe since 2018. He lives and works in Hanover.

Alexander Steig