Browsing the drawings and other works on paper in Neo Rauch’s “Aus dem Boden/From the Floor” at the Drawing Center feels like flipping through a newspaper in a language closely related to, but not mutually intelligible with, your own. Once they’re framed in an exhibition, of course, they become finished pieces, but this German painter doesn’t necessarily make them with that in mind. They’re not specific studies, either; instead, he produces them as a kind of warm-up for painting, often throwing them to the studio floor when they’re done.
But Mr. Rauch renders, say, two men with palm trees growing out of their heads, or a durian-shaped bomb falling on a house, with almost neurotic precision. Together with the drawings’ elegantly askew composition, this sets up a tantalizing sense of specific messages or meanings hovering permanently just out of reach.
In a 1995 group of felt-tip-pen drawings, the unbridgeable contrast between black ink and white paper amplifies this dissonance till you can almost hear it buzzing. In a large oil like “Die Erwartung,” in which a horned artist meditates over a bowl of fruit, the same sense thickens into the narrow, firmly anchored feeling of closely observed detail, making for a portrait not quite of real life, but of the tonal quality of reality.