Texts
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Becker
Introduction to the exhibition Zwischen Feld Raum
Castle Burgau, Düren, 2 December 2007
What do we see in this exhibition of works by Gerlinde Zantis, Dieter Call, and Michael Dohle?
What do the artists see?
We see large photographs, most black-and-white, some of the more recent ones in color; we see „colored-dust images“, drawings that refuse to be categorized as drawings; we see small cut-paper works, painted images, and sculptures in wood and concrete. One theme unites these objects: The site that has inspired them.
When I learned the name of the site, I looked for it on the map. „Département 70“, Haute-Saône, France, between Besancon and Dijon. As an art historian, I ssked – What is worth seeing there? The answer – Nothing. The Romans settled the area; then came the Franks, the Burgundians, the French, the Spanish. The region has been French since 1678. It had a substantial iron industry in the 19th century, but the last blast furnace went cold in 1905. Industrial-scale agriculture is now widely dominant. Tourism is scant. The county seat is called Vesoul.
What do the images show of the country that inspired them? Fields of grain extending among and into forests; unclassifiable buildings, perhaps ruins.
Its attractions seem so modest that the question posed of the artists – What do they see there? – shifts, with new curiosity, to – What are they looking for there?
Are they visiting, founding, an artists’ colony, a Barbizon, Pont-Aven, Worpswede, where artists from different places can meet? No; they are the only ones traveling there. Are they searching for the sun of the south of France, the light that the Dutchman van Gogh sought? For flowers, billowing fields of grain, colors? No. The artists’ gazes there are directed not toward the heavens, not toward the light, but downward, toward the earth. They are seeking out the corners where forests and fields end, the foundations of old buildings concealed in fields, the stones in stubblefields. They are seeking out not daylight, but twilight, night, moonlight that obscures. Their favorite color is black.
With Gerlinde Zantis, that black consists of dust, of mineral pigments. It is a wonderfully rich culmination of tones of blue, brown, and green that produce a saturated seeming black. With Dieter Call it is either black paper, in the cut-paper works, or black soot in the sculptures and paintings. With Michael Dohle it is granules in the photographic paper, it is pixels.
Call has let me know that he experiences black synesthetically, as a compression, in which these two sculptures, for example, have the effect of kettledrum blows. Call is a musician.
And all three think in spaces: A sculpture in one space forcibly creates a new space; spaces give rise to corners, depths, horizons. Then there is also light, but scantily; twilight, moonlight, reflected light – as in the shepherd’s hut where Dohle worked. Time as well, pulled to pieces when Dohle uses his camera as a moving instrument; or when blurs in Zantis’ images made from colored dust suggest movement of the light or of the wind.
Three mature artists with careers that include row after row of exhibitions.
What are they looking for?
They are searching – in the heaps of stones, stubble, pigment dust, soot flecks, pixels, in this disorder, this chaos – for forms, arrangements, meanings.
„The world of appearances, as we experience it using our
senses, is a formless mass; and behind it eternal,
unchangeable forms are concealed, which we can perceive
thanks to the transcendental gaze of theory. The
amorphous mass of appearances (the „material world“, the
„world of matter“) is an illusion, and the forms concealed
behind it (the „world of forms“) are the reality that is
revealed, thanks to theory. This actually occurs through
recognition of how the amorphous forms flow into the
appearances, fill them, and then flow out again into their
amorphous state. We more closely approach this
contradiction between „matter“ and „form“ if we replace
the word „matter“ with „stuff“… The word „stuff“ is
both noun and verb; the material world is what is stuffed into forms, what fills the forms.“
This quote from Vilém Flusser (Der Schein des Materials [The Appearance of Matter], 1991) shows how he could reverse the conventional thought that the corporeal world can be reduced to signs. The signs – so he claimed – are older than the material world of appearances. But where do we find these signs or signals? According to philosophers of perception, they are in the human eye, the human brain, which projects them into the structure of the world that can be experienced; man gives order to the world that man perceives. Man creates symbols that are „traffic signals“, that arrange the world. Man projects forms that dominate; that dominate space, indeed dominate the world. Everyone unconsciously contributes his or her forms to the world in giving it order; this activity becomes, for the artist, a conscious duty. He or she is educated to give meaning to these forms, to give symbolic form to these forms. That is the artist’s solipsism: Incorporating all existence into his or her consciousness.
A digression; one made in the hope of providing suggestions on how to „read“ the works of Gerlinde Zantis, Dieter Call, and Michael Dohle. Such suggestions seem worthwhile, as these works defy superficial observation. This gives them a special value.
Wolfgang Becker
Drawing versus painting: (Wolfgang Becker)
Comments on the work of Gerlinde Zantis
Let us define our terms. To draw can mean: With a pencil or crayon in one’s hand, to set dry graphite or compacted, coloured powder onto a piece of paper in order solidly to outline an object, to sketch a form, that is to be brought to completion in another medium; or to insert solid, clearly outlined elements or precise lines into a “painterly” image of indistinct forms. But can to draw also mean with the crayon, or pencil, or even one’s fingers to rub graphite and coloured pigments into the substance of a sheet of paper? To set coloured dust here and there, to erase, layer, pull, press, roughen, smooth it?
One can scarcely recognise drawn lines, or sketched forms, in Gerlinde Zantis’ “drawings”. The sharpened pencil moved across the page betrays its passage only rarely. In these images something different happens, something whose trajectory is defined neither by drawing nor yet indeed by painting. (Indeed Zantis’ mentor, Günther Knipp, had already piled contradiction upon contradiction, setting up a competition like the one that painters once began against photographers: To paint a photograph, or perhaps, to draw a painting.)
But in her art we need not begin by looking backward. An additional phenomenon is taking shape against what we can see in electronic devices. Whether the screen shows a hazy evening landscape or the painted image of a hazy evening landscape, what the observer’s retina absorbs is great numbers of particles of coloured dust, circling and circling. And he may perhaps feel a profound uncertainty – they bring tears to his eyes, the tears that rise when he beholds a landscape in the dim twilight. Might he take the pixels for the misty droplets of the landscape’s haze?
Admittedly the “drawings” of Gerlinde Zantis are much farther removed from translations of painted pictures into another medium than are the TV images that reproduce either landscapes, or pictures of landscapes, or even reproductions of pictures of landscapes – however much both Zantis’ “drawings” and the TV images remind us, from time to time, of painted pictures from the past. Zantis’ images are, first and foremost, “modelled” in coloured dust; they could not be generated in any other way. And only these pictures in coloured dust, not their reproductions in photographs or on a screen, fully reveal themselves.
No long tradition exists for this way of making pictures. Gerlinde Zantis does not have to compete with others whose work approaches hers too nearly. She is alone; in her pictures she seeks a conversation with herself: I, alone, and the shore; and the barrier islands of Baltic Kurland; and the darkness of the moon.
What does it mean to say that some of the “pictures” that she draws seem possessed? Of course Gerhard Richter 40 years ago painted melancholy, distant-horizoned landscapes of the Eifel region that some of her images bring to mind; but, painting in oils, he simply could not achieve the mineral density, the power of light, that an image like her “Strasse” (“Road”) of 2004 displays. No; in these large pictures, through bravura of presentation, through dexterity that borders on sleight-of-hand, she succeeds uncannily in transporting familiar “pictures” to a plane on which they become simulacra, the apparitions seen in dreams.
In this the artist has denied herself all the significance-laden elements whose symbolism might anchor what her images express: No props of the sort that Caspar David Friedrich used; no persons, ruins of churches, crosses marking tombs, dead trees, owls. Only depth is important to her. The eyes of the viewer must sense that they are being pulled into her pictures, over rises and bridges, gliding along paths, until they can open on the horizon and gaze into the heavens. They pierce shadow and mist in their search for the glorious light that reaches its completion as a reflection behind the darkness. Yet even if the artist’s large images lack “signifying” elements, they express a sublimity, a gentle pathos, that links her with the Romantics who painted nature in the nineteenth century.
Gerlinde Zantis has organised her substantial body of work. In the small sketches (approximately 7 × 10 cm) we still recognise the grouped strokes from which the images are produced, as if they were excerpts seen at close range. The larger the images grow (8 × 11, 16 × 22, 22 × 32, up to the definitive format of 73 × 102 cm) the greater their loss of “hand-drawn” quality and the closer they approach a state released from their subject, a state released into anonymity, in which they seem mirrors to the viewer’s eyes. He will find oddly familiar the world that they reflect, as if he already had seen it depicted many times, a world over which a quiet, gentle melancholy rules; a melancholy that shuns the dramatic, almost motionless, fixed and crystalline, like sand polished by the wind through years.
Aachen 2005-04-02
Wolfgang Becker, former Director of the Ludwig-Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen