Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84 Page 85 Page 86 Page 87 Page 88 Page 89 Page 90 Page 91 Page 92 Page 93 Page 94 Page 95 Page 9634 (2007), in an essentially turbulent background dominated by shades of green and stabilized by black and verticals, a face shows itself (whether male or female, however, remains intentionally unclear) framed by a sweeping red band resulting in a round form that is open to the lower right. Beyond the fact that all the elements constitute painting and figure in a central composition, they have rather little to do with each other.The picture intentionally does not correspond directly to an everyday experience albeit indirectly: the “red swipe” calls to mind the circling of words or images (or parts of them) when working through papers. And it also occurs in the tabloid press as a so-called “disrupter” in order to attract attention. Here, Raab addresses dissociative moments, thus the disruption of or divergence from the normally integrative functions of consciousness (or the perception of the world in general). This occurs not in the sense of a neurophysiological, pathological disturbance that is manifested in the partial or complete loss of the normal integration efforts of the memory, but rather as a result of the increased emphasis on the visual contexts of perception, which the viewer has to recreate from the individual elements. In the end, Raab indeed does not show a sheet on which someone has circled something in red but instead makes an art-image that refers to the effects of this method interpreted in such a way. In Pretty Grenade—It is not a game (2009), he presents the “portrait” of a hand grenade in freely executed painting and in bright colors that very nearly might be called cheerful. This can also be explained in terms of dissociation, since hand grenades simply do not look like this, and what is done with them can also not be called pretty. The crinkled stainless steel with a frame processed in the same manner on which the image is painted thus leads to consideration of possible impli- cations—a self-reinforcing aesthetic-semantic process that demands viewers’ repeated atten- tion and also challenges them. Beauty and horror are united here and thus (according to Edmund Burke in 1757) what is also concerned is the sublime even if only in the form of an ironic reference, which is, however, intended seriously insofar as it refers to the fact that there is an aesthetics of horror, precisely as William Butler Yeats wrote about in the poem (Easter, 1916) about the Irish Easter Rising of 1916 that was published in 1921: “A terrible beauty is born.”5 Many of Simon Raab’s images are also “terrible beauties” in a certain sense even when they distance themselves from the conventional aesthetics of painting in order to take up their own particular position. Beauty is appropriate to them, an artistic beauty that, however, has nothing to do with verist ruthlessness. In contrast: the embedding of the motifs in a specific type of painterly composition along with the processing ofthe surface reconstructs a subjective,encom- passing, interpretive, and indeed seemingly historical interrelation. 5 First privately printed by Clement Shorter in 1917; the revised version first appeared in the New Statesman on October 23, 1920.