Also the “New Painting” of the 21st century, as we practice it, is a painting of concepts and certain technical procedures. Most bearable to me seems a kind of painting which at least ironically attempts to make seeing itself the object and which uses wilful techniques.
What I am interested in are independent lines of tradition of art history, for example the big family of portrait painting. Part of this is the endless row of “ancestral galleries,” inimitably eccentric, costumed ladies and gentlemen of the past, which look at us with a unique power of suggestiveness. As independent of fashions one finds there qualitative highlights and defeats. How difficult it is to fit in this row, if one thinks of Rembrandt, Nicolaes Maes, Frans Hals, Goya. or Bacon.
So, as far as I am concerned, also in my newer works I have not utilized the terminology of “antique art,” well aware that in the aesthetic, religious, and moral realm every gesture which tries to postulate a negativum submits itself to the dialectics of the system and merely produces a new style, a new system.
The problem of painting, for example – after the immaterial – still persists. There would have to be a shortening of one’s own world of expression, up to silence.
Of course, the figures which appear, the poetic, surreal elements which I insert and the spaces which attract me, speak for themselves. But placed in a new “system of coordinates” and in distance to themselves, they take on a new role from the very beginning.
Since dealing with images in advertising, film, and, last but not least, art has brought us to regard pictures as a totality, we first attempt to read the elements of a picture atomistically but then to assemble them to a whole again.. One could speak of a kind of “coercion to integrate.” Yet the technical itself rather reveals a state of reflection: themes encounter technical procedures, a certain kind of painting, the style of the brush. In the difference of the natural and the represented we experience the degree of distance, which shows again in the difference of overcome and newly discovered means.
So the “dialectics of the picture” primarily means construction and negation. Could we accomplish stopping at a “privileged moment,” one could speak of exposing one’s own experienced time.
Fortunate, if the result stimulates the power of imagination and has an incomprehensible character, which keeps the observer’s imagination in a constant and unsatisfiable tension.
It continues to be the dialectics of (the art of) painting: First, the picture is right on the right side and you change the left, then the right side is bad and you might as well scratch off the whole picture. It may never be too done, too fixed, too good, too closed. A picture should always keep the view free for the next one. It should remain open.
The perfect picture, I would say, is one “interpretational engine breakdown.”
What I am interested in are independent lines of tradition of art history, for example the big family of portrait painting. Part of this is the endless row of “ancestral galleries,” inimitably eccentric, costumed ladies and gentlemen of the past, which look at us with a unique power of suggestiveness. As independent of fashions one finds there qualitative highlights and defeats. How difficult it is to fit in this row, if one thinks of Rembrandt, Nicolaes Maes, Frans Hals, Goya. or Bacon.
So, as far as I am concerned, also in my newer works I have not utilized the terminology of “antique art,” well aware that in the aesthetic, religious, and moral realm every gesture which tries to postulate a negativum submits itself to the dialectics of the system and merely produces a new style, a new system.
The problem of painting, for example – after the immaterial – still persists. There would have to be a shortening of one’s own world of expression, up to silence.
Of course, the figures which appear, the poetic, surreal elements which I insert and the spaces which attract me, speak for themselves. But placed in a new “system of coordinates” and in distance to themselves, they take on a new role from the very beginning.
Since dealing with images in advertising, film, and, last but not least, art has brought us to regard pictures as a totality, we first attempt to read the elements of a picture atomistically but then to assemble them to a whole again.. One could speak of a kind of “coercion to integrate.” Yet the technical itself rather reveals a state of reflection: themes encounter technical procedures, a certain kind of painting, the style of the brush. In the difference of the natural and the represented we experience the degree of distance, which shows again in the difference of overcome and newly discovered means.
So the “dialectics of the picture” primarily means construction and negation. Could we accomplish stopping at a “privileged moment,” one could speak of exposing one’s own experienced time.
Fortunate, if the result stimulates the power of imagination and has an incomprehensible character, which keeps the observer’s imagination in a constant and unsatisfiable tension.
It continues to be the dialectics of (the art of) painting: First, the picture is right on the right side and you change the left, then the right side is bad and you might as well scratch off the whole picture. It may never be too done, too fixed, too good, too closed. A picture should always keep the view free for the next one. It should remain open.
The perfect picture, I would say, is one “interpretational engine breakdown.”
