Schwarze Blätter

Since the late 1990s, when he isn't immersed in his work as a visual artist (in collaboration with artist Anders Guggisberg) or stage performer (as Dr. Lüdi), Andres Lutz has been turning out a multitude of what he calls schwarze Blätter—"black sheets". His white-on-black drawings are an odd mix of asceticism and playful whimsy. Usually without any preconceived plan, Lutz dips his pen in white ink and moves it across a blank black surface, which is also an imaginary space, a window at night, producing a crack of light in a stretched black canvas, like a slit made by a cutter.
The white line adds something to the world that wasn't there ten seconds before: this is the essential magic of the drawing process. These are bona fide visual jokes, to be sure, but they're also—at least in intention—refined little works of art, which can be freely or firmly divided up into categories or chapters, including cartoons, political and apolitical caricatures, picture puns and puzzles, rebuses and brain teasers, secret pictures to be scrutinized and cherished. And then there are spidery childlike doodles, portraits of philosophers, design sketches of imaginary installation art and sculptures, for instance a series of skulls that are also vessels. What's more, dreamscapes, cityscapes and various and sundry other landscapes, drawings on the subject of urban sprawl or tax evasion. Plus insects, as well as Neolithic petroglyphs from Karelia and cave-drawn bison from northern Spain. In addition, depictions of local and foreign customs, illustrations of recipes, esoteric courses, flowers and trees, trees and vegetables, bushes and ferns, animals belonging to the emperor, as Borges put it... And last but not least, psychedelic wimmelpictures teeming with hidden objects, whose discovery is a cosmic delight.
All this is nurtured by Dr. Lüdi's irrepressible penchant for gleeful irony, which is naturally a front for melancholy and flows through the nib of the pen, a point as narrow as the eye of a needle, into a parallel world, a nighttime starscape.