“His theme is humanity; his artistic mother tongue is the figure, the object through which and in which man lives, suffers, rejoices, feels, and thinks. The starting point of his works is personally experienced suffering, whether existential hardship or rejection and failure. Cazals’ sculpture is a compensation for a withdrawal from a disappointing and restrictive society.”

Drawing, in particular, serves to express his experiences and emotions through its immediacy. Initially, the works significantly bear his birth name, “Udo Klein”; only later do they become works of the painter-tenor “Carlo Cazals.” The biographical, existential origin of the drawings is clear; he frequently provides references to his home, “Hamburg – St. Pauli.” The traumas of childhood run deep; the difficult path as an artist, his outsider status, find their expression in the artistic medium.

Through his teachers, Cazals becomes acquainted with the art-historical arsenal of styles and forms. Obvious are the role models Pablo Picasso, the destroyer of the beautiful nude in the “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” and Horst Janssen, the enfant terrible of the Hamburg art scene. There are also borrowings from the magical spatial constructions and mannequins of Giorgio de Chirico and the existential cages of Alberto Giacometti.

The drawing begins on an already used and thus animated surface, which challenges, guides, resists, and accommodates his harsh aesthetic. Cazals seeks painting surfaces with patina, on which life has already left its mark. He uses scratches, smudges, and paint smears as inspiration, taking them as an impulse for the placement of a form or figure. On this basis, he develops what he calls his “bizarre irrationalism.”

The artist’s hand reacts like a seismograph to the stirrings of the psyche. The works appear unplanned and spontaneous. It is a subjective pictorial world of fantasy and memory. Temporal and spatial distance makes it possible to merge countless associations of emotionally experienced events in the aesthetic structure of the image. In the process, a kind of Écriture automatique frees the critical spirit from its rational shackles; outside of aesthetic and moral concerns, feelings and ideas flow onto the paper or canvas.

Soon after the first stroke, his demons appear; the pen or brush brings them forth. Surreal beings emerge from the material, the line, and the vision. But Cazals does not seek the unconscious, but the conscious. His drawings reflect experiential content or are realizations of concrete fears and aggressions. In them, his pain and resentment against reality manifest themselves, as does the need for refuge in an art world.

Sometimes with elegant verve, sometimes nervously scribbling, he draws human figures. However, these are often based on idiosyncratic metamorphoses. Hybrid formations such as “Worm Creature” and “Predatory Fish Character” refer to the animalistic side of man. Cazals’ personal bestiary can be read symbolically, such as the ram’s head, which is on the one hand an archaic sign of virility, but also the alter ego of the artist born in April. Most of the time, the human anatomy is disproportionate, fragmented, and its plastic integrity destroyed. This shattered syntax reflects the existential threat. One sees painful amputations, fragments, remnants, or imperfections. The joining together of dislocated body parts is reminiscent of the “Cadavres exquis” of the Surrealists. But their playful poetry is missing; the combinatorics of the injured body parts seem too drastic. Cazals’ figurative collages mostly develop from the line: the associative and additive process often produces a coarse-meshed nerve network, tense, knotted, an inextricable tangle of human parts, inextricably and inescapably connected.

It is not clear whether there is an internal relationship between the things or whether it is a non-relational forced union. Heads, a leg, a severed foot, a female breast—Cazals’ body parts pile up—entangled or wedged, morbid and fleshy—into grotesque heaps of people, marked by eroticism and violence: an idiosyncratic variation of Calvary. His panopticon oscillates between sarcastic caricature and the drama of a dysfunctional humanity. Many of these “objets désagréables” undergo a transformation in the further artistic design: automatistic line notations become sculptural complexes. Cazals adds modeling with light and shadow, constructs a perspectival surrounding, studio, or stage space, and places his heads and accumulations on pedestals, tables, and frames. He creates works of art within the work of art.

In the “Study St. Pauli – Milieu” we see a convulsive beauty of swinging lines and convex forms. His favorite motif, the woman, is circled by a swarm of secondary motifs. In the uninhibited and uncensored stream of consciousness, his “Fascination Femina” is revealed; here the surrealist pleasure principle prevails. But the erotic theme is sublimated; the opulent female does not seem to be of flesh and blood; half script, half sculpture, it lands as an artifact on a pedestal without a lower body.

Fetish or misfortune-averting apotropaion?

The process of drawing leads Cazals to a concretization of his inner world. In the sculptures, thoughts acquire a vivid presence, his demons become tangible and are simultaneously banished. Objectification in the image is a form of coping and liberation. Cazals’ world is characterized by suffering and passions; it is a world in which people are born, suffer, love—a tragic art to which nothing human is alien and in which an overwhelming fear of the world becomes palpable. The drawing, and within it the plastic conception of worldly experience, becomes discursive language through its presentation. Although the origin of the signs is a deeply subjective one, the images are to be understood as a message. In Cazals’ eyes, his works are a manifestation of a crisis that is not only his own. He sees himself as both an observer and a provocateur. His social criticism is underscored by annotations and image titles. They range from simple empiricism such as “Characterology St. Pauli” to defeatism: “Awakened Rubbish” and “Sons of Hell.” Cazals, “The Powerless Individualist,” warns against “Philistines” and “Bourgeois.” The German sociologist Georg Simmel writes: “The deepest problems of modern life stem from the individual’s claim to preserve the independence and uniqueness of his existence against the superior powers of society, of historical heritage, of the external culture and technology of life.”

But are there glimmers of hope in Cazals’ work? Yes, we see “Angel Visions,” “An Attempt: The New Human,” and “The New Development Human.” Only the “Exit” remains tiny.”

Dagmar Lott-Reschke (M.A.), art historian, Hamburg: