Otto was halfway down the summit of Großglockner when he came across an alpinist heading in the opposite direction. He shifted a little and picked up his head. This indiscretion nearly cost him his footing. He was tired, wrapped in heavy wool, although he’d torn the gabardine hours ago.
Grüß Gott. Otto shouted to the alpinist once he regained his composure, making sure someone had spoken God’s name on that stretch of the mountain. His counterpart pressed on, immediately disappearing over the rise. If I spoke would I make his point? He didn’t have the patience for all the shedding and moulting.
Many miles north in Berlin, Bellwether doesn’t ask for grace. The paintings are part of Aljoscha Tschaidse’s journey through the pass. If there’s one characteristic they have in common, it’s that they resist the heaviness of moral certainty. The viewer counsels himself that he should probably tread carefully.
Tschaidse’s crosses appear on one canvas after another, on top of various mountaintops. Flipped over or vacant, they hang comatose, like a gesture interrupted. Whatever presence they claimed dissolves into soft, searching outlines, traces of something that no longer holds.
Many are matched with abstracted horizons, some stamped with faded angels. Or a face or scene from another time, we never really know. Paul Rubens’, maybe. It’s an aesthetic of resistance, an anti-sublime backdrop that keeps us from the brink of discovery.
Happy End (2025) is Tschaidse’s least subtle articulation of his deepest reflections. The title itself, wrapped across one side of the painting, disappears behind some frosty clouds and over the top of the canvas. Unsurprisingly, it fails to promise anything like arrival.
There was a scene after the alpinist left Otto at the pass. It’s refracted across Tschaidse’s canvases in varying degrees of clarity. The wind was steady but no longer hostile. The alpinist was standing, leaning on a signpost. No one was there to witness it, but his face softened, became less distant. The cross had mutated.
Written by Robert Frost
