There is a strange rapprochement, too, between the abstract schematics of cybernetics and the spare economy of cave art. Ohne Titel (1961), for instance, is an exceptionally stark posing of the question of the artist's position with regards to power. It is so effective only because Penck's primitivism excises all that is unnecessary for the painting's central demand; in that way, it resembles Paul Klee's equally uncompromising 1903 etching Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank. This frugal and parsimonious style is not without its drawbacks. The 1970-'72 Standart series, depicting variations on a stylized, Vitruvian human figure, was intended to represent a socialist and democratic alternative art, almost a content-level analogue to Asger Jorn's "industrial painting." It is completely unsuccessful in this regard. Rather, it seems to access a terrain of pure symbolic structure outside of ideology, outside of politics, perhaps even outside of aesthetics. After completing the several dozen works in this series, the author suffered a creative crisis — the possibilities offered by this terrain, it appears, were rather limited.

Penck's mid-'70s paintings, under a number of new pseudonyms (Mike Hammer, "TM"), show a retreat from this kind of abstraction towards a more explicit engagement with theory. 1973's Standart-Theorie, Standart-Technik, for instance, constructs an apparently dialectical hierarchy: "Theorie I" includes various historical concepts like "Weltkrieg," "Technologie," and so on; "Theorie II" includes sundry psychoanalytic terms like "Sensualismus" and "Totem"; and the two are presumably transcended by a synthetic, and unelaborated, "Standart-Theorie." While these paintings are intellectually thought-provoking, they rely heavily on word-collage and conventional techniques of abstraction, which dilutes their effect. Penck is at his best when he realizes the full potential of his "recourse to archeology" — the immediacy and embodiedness of his cave paintings combined with theoretical sophistication.

Unfortunately, in the last three decades, he has largely avoided this style in favor of sprawling, dimly neo-primitivist abstract canvases, many having to do with the Germanies' tribulations before the fall of the Berlin Wall. These are not quite as powerful as, for instance, his old comrade Jörg Immendorff's Cafe Deutschland series. One, however, stands out from the rest: 1995's Theoretiker und Löwe (Hieronimus modern). The lion that dominates the right half of the canvas evokes the animal scenes of Lascaux; yet, unlike Lascaux, the human figure is not elided. The painting draws a thread through time, from the prehistoric shaman's encounters with malevolent spirits, to the Christian legend of St. Jerome and the lion, to the contemporary radical theoretician's struggle with the looming and faceless incarnation of power. Yet the essence of this eternal confrontation remains inaccessible: it is both atavistic and unassimilably modern, both arcane and abstract. Such is the paradox that underlies Penck's art.