Christopher Winter at Neuhoff Edelman

Art in America, Jan, 2008 by Jonathan Goodman

Although the British-born, Berlin-based painter Christopher Winter titled his exhibition "Songs of Innocence," the children and young adolescents he portrays convey a sensibility that can hardly be called naive. His figures wear traditional German costume-dirndls and lederhosen and Tyrolean hats--and enact small dramas in exquisite northern landscapes, but the works' true emphasis centers on the mysteries of nature and early erotic experience. The protagonists play out scenarios that startle and even disturb, given their youthfulness. Elaborating on the sexuality of childhood, Winter walks on ground that has been trodden before, but his contributions include acts of gender switching and active sex play. He catches his young characters at the moment when their curiosity loses its innocence and joins the experience of adults.

In The Voyeur (2007), a large acrylic-on-canvas painting, a youth stands in a thicket of slim birches at night, his face half-hidden by one of the tree trunks. He gravely stares at some spectacle we are unable to see, which casts a shadowy light on him and the trees. The title implies prurience, while the darkness in the wooded area behind the boy suggests an inherent threat. The painting intimates menace while offering no evidence of its cause. Another painting, Strange Fascination (2006), captures a specifically sexual moment: a girl, wearing a green dress that has been tucked back to show her thighs, pulls down a boy's lederhosen to expose his backside. She gapes, open-mouthed, while the lake and lengthening shadows of the trees add a natural drama to the scene.

Nature in Winter's paintings is nearly always depicted in the fluid shifts of twilight, so that the forests, mountains and trees seem spectral and lend an anxious background to his art. In Changes (2007), a blond boy wears a mauve dress over his white shirt and black shorts, while a girl pulls her shirt off over her head, revealing a pair of white briefs. Again the foreground is bright and the background dark, punctuated by two illuminated windows of a house on the right. Winter's paintings construct a world of fledgling desire, embodied in children who suddenly seem to know more, much more, than they used to.--Jonathan Goodman