Made with FlowPaper - Flipbook Maker
PERSONAL PATH INHALT CONTENTS 3 5 BEATE REIFENSCHEID IRIDESCENT REFLECTIONS AUF DER SUCHE NACH DER WAHREN NATUR 11 BEATE REIFENSCHEID IRIDESCENT REFLECTIONS - IN SEARCH OF TRUE NATURE 16 BILDTEIL ILLUSTRATIONS 51 DIETER RONTE ABSTRAKTION ALS PERSON LICH ER WEG 59 DIETER RONTE ABSTRACTION AS A PERSONAL PATH 64 BILDTEIL ILLUSTRATIONS 116 VERZEICHNIS DER ABGEBILDETEN WERKE LIST OF ILLUSTRATED WORKS 123 CURRICULUM VITAE AUSSTELLUNGEN, PREISE, VEROFFENTLICHUNGEN EXHIBITIONS, AWARDS, PUBLICATIONS Iridescent Reflections* - In Search of True Nature "The small space between explanation of the pain ting and the painting itself gives the only possible perspective on painting. Every painting is incomple te, just as every memory is incomplete." Luc Tuymans For centuries nature has been the real teacher of the arts. Artists have oriented themselves toward it, extracted the secrets of working mechanisms and their construction from it, understood it as a mirror of heavenly processes and finally also as a surface on which to project their emotions. From the discovery of Plein Air painting around the end of the 19th Cen tury, artists understood nature in its location-specific atmosphere, and sought in their painterly explora tions to remain as faithful to nature in style as possi ble. Rhythm and tempo continued to mark the fluid, brisk and immediate painting style which followed. Again and again, light and shadow have determined the perception of the objects of nature, which are not interpreted but are rather observed in their physical appearance and directly conveyed. Immediacy as a synthesis of the constant changeability of natural processes, even in parallel with rapidly developing technology which similarly brought movement and speed into everyday life, formed the basis of a tho roughgoing inspiration which brought forth the idea that man could master nature and technology in equal measure. Beyond the aesthetic quality which continues to move and inspire viewers, the painting of Impres sionism initiated a revolutionary change within art by attributing to colour a value in its own right for the • According to a work title of Susan Swartz ' Luc Tuymans, Source: Art Now, Vol.II, Taschen Verlag, 2005, page 518 11 first time and by applying colour independently of the colour of the object itself. More and more, co lour was not merely a substitute for something, but instead increasingly gained its own independence. The discovery that there was a nuanced world of colour, beyond the local colouration, which is un der constant transformation, was an experience that could only occur in direct engagement with and in nature. Unlike before, there now not only emer ged sketches in nature, but painters developed their compositions directly in nature and sought in rapid tempo to capture the most important impres sions on the canvas. This was an immediate, direct perception of nature which with the "innocence of the eye", proclaimed for the first time by John Ruskin, made it possible to give oneself over entirely, without preconceived ideas, to the real phenomena. Through preconceived vision the eye of the obser ver would for a long time not have been in a positi on to look more closely and to recognise that in the play of light diverse possibilities of perception, even of absolutely everyday phenomena, are present. On seeing Claude Monet's "haystack" paintings John Ruskin said that he was seeing a painting for the very first time. In doing so he was differentiating clearly between a way of seeing determined by knowledge, but not by one's own, situational vision, and another way which does engage with such transformations. The art historian Max lmdahl has examined the relati onship between these different perspectives in great depth and has distinguished between" ... a seeing vi sion and a recognising vision of objects. In the habi tual recognising vision, the preconceived concept of the object is redeemed, whereas in the other, the see ing vision, the unfiltered flood of visual impressions is experienced by the viewer. Both ways of seeing take effect in the viewer, however they are weighted diffe rently, with the seeing vision normally subordinated to the recognising vision. » ... in the normal, habitual vision of objects, the seeing vision [isl subordinated to the recognising vision ... precisely because in see ing an object that is in reality before one's eyes the preconceived concept of this object is optically rede emed ... «" .2 The disentanglement of painting traditions and a leaning towards an unprejudiced vision which made it possible to engage with colour phenomena anew were decisive. This made it possible, for example, for snow not only to be painted as white but also green, blue or even violet. The key was to observe the mo ment, at the zenith of its impact and at once con veyed into the painting, to make apparent this con stant transformation in the passage of the times of day and the seasons. The artistic contribution of the Impressionists lay in making possible this power in the phenomenon and in the perception of the obser ver. "In this sense, there was a switch from a system of painting based on facts to an energetic system in which the image for the first time emerged as a result of the participation of the observer in the energetic power of the painting. " 3 ln Expressionism, especially in the circle of the artists of "Die Brucke" (the Bridge) and in the Fauves -such as Matisse or Derain -colour is even more radically freed and applied as a material in its own right. Like no other movement in art before it, this resulted in the most significant renewal of pain ting in the first half of the 20th Century. Above all, immediately after the Second World War artists in Europe and America came together in returning to the deepest interior of painting: they recalled Vassily Kandinsky's "On the Spiritual in Art" (1911), through which he was able to guide the artists of his generati on in an entirely new direction based on a fundamen tal sensual transformation. At heart, this could only mean radically engaging with abstractions, in order to avoid getting stuck in the supposedly illustrative, which could all too easily be instrumentalised and carried ambiguous connections. The artists of Europe and America come together in the great line of abstract painters after 1945. Their ties are interwoven across the Atlantic and also include impulses from Zen Buddhism. Ab stract Expressionism is an important starting point informally in Germany and in Tachisme in France, in which the developments of abstract painting are re flected and mutually influence each other. For the American artist Susan Swartz, who has been painting for more than forty years, it is nature alone that is manifested in her work. This sounds simple, yet it is not obvious -especially when one calls to mind that pure landscape painting has for a long time not played a role in contemporary art. Today nature enters the art scene in other forms, whether it is through the projects of the Land Art artists or through the substitution of the material itself, such as honey in the work of Wolfgang Laib, stones in Richard Long, and water in Hans Haake, among others. Sus an Swartz for her part seems in the broadest sense to orient herself toward the positions of her precursors, especially in Impressionism. If one locates her work 2 Martina Sauer, Cezanne, van Gogh, Monet, Genese der Abstraktion (Genesis of Abstraction), 2014 p. 57 3 Martina Sauer, Cezanne, van Gogh, Monet, Genese der Abstraktion (Genesis of Abstraction), 2014 p. 13 12 exclusively under this premise, one mistakenly places her in an entirely false corner. Only a superficial view searches for the echoes of Impressionism, because at the first look the painterly texture and the characte ristic style of light and shade recall the accidental fac tor of the daylight and the seasons, as the impressio nists sought them. At the second look, however, the viewer becomes aware that Susan Swartz is seeking a different synthesis with nature. Her artistic inspiration always goes beyond a direct engagement with land scape, which however she does not tire of seeking in the most diverse places in the world: whether it is in the d ry terrain of Utah, the sunny hills of California or in the inspirations which she collects on her travels in Europe and Africa. She sits right in the middle of this when she paints, diving into a nature whose beauty she aims to mirror. In this aspect too she is related to the Impressionists; however she does not want to re main on the surface but instead to truly bind the ever new potential of nature into the painting. The two far-flung poles of constancy in the recurring rhythm in the sign of the seasons and the continuous develop ment on a sensitive, only gradually perceivable scale are interwoven. Similarly to the Impressionists Susan Swartz re mains narratively closely oriented towards the mo tif, such that the context of the landscape -forest, lake, mountains, etc. -always remains visible. Unlike them, however, Susan Swartz treats colour with con siderable freedom and does not seek the reflection of brief light processes in the painting, instead gi ving the landscape an almost mythical quality. This is apparent in each of her paintings, especially when one concentrates exclusively on the selected colour 13 harmonies. "Amethyst Grove" (2008) and "Morning Calm" (2003) are examples in which it becomes visi ble that the element of colour is introduced to inten sify the perception of nature. In "Morning Calm" Su san Swartz bathes the forest in a rich, dark red, while the grass beneath the trees, the foliage and finally also the sky are bathed in red tones of varying in tensity. In "Crimson Reflections" (2007) she takes up this "all-over" quality of the colour atmosphere and drenches the whole natural scene ry in a dramatically blazing red, which is only transformed into a deep night black along the imaginary area of the horizon. The composition here is already completely abstract, only through the partition of the surface of the image by the area in black in the middle does the viewer associate a landscape in which can be read a fore ground (red), horizon area (black, black-violet) and sky (red), while through the painterly texture blurring can be interpreted as a reflection of shadowing. The thin yellow dabs and the violet sprinkled colour-fleck patterns towards the upper edge of the painting in voluntarily become a late evening scene with a sun that has set, whose deep, dark reflections on the fir mament of nature add a gnawing drama of fire. Their links to Impressionism become clearest in the water lily paintings, which would be unthinkable wi thout Claude Monet's "Water Lilies" of 1897-1889. With his immediate view on the surface of the water and his avoidance of the horizon line, Monet created a perspective which became the forerunner concept ofthe great artists of Abstract Expressionism, such as Jackson Pollock and his Drippings. In Susan Swartz too, the gaze of the viewer is completely sunk on and into the surface of the water, it finds itself at once immediately in the element of water. Some of her compositions tend towards an almost complete ele vation of objects in favour of a free play of the forces of colour. It almost seems as if this could point the way for their further development. The nuances bet ween concretely figurative and by tendentially abs tract elements lie side by side here. Susan Swartz does not merely paint nature, however: instead through her painting she gives it an individu al spirit which is closely bound up with her own view of nature. This also becomes clear be-yond what she herself again and again says about her works and what others, above all her friend Jane Goodall, the well-known researcher of apes, say about them. "Su san Swartz shares my concern for the future of life on this planet. Each of her paintings richly illustrates the beauty of our world ... " . 4 She herself states that, "My goal is to elicit emotions ... I paint what God has gi ven and align my work with others who show us how fragile our world has become. " 5 This almost missio nary inspiration of her artistic sense of self is based on her own painful experience of illness, which has burdened her for years. This experience spurs her on to engage actively for the sake of the environment. Artistically, this means always approaching nature anew and testing different modes of painting. The most important element for her in this is the colour in her works, whose creation should not be determined by the perception and transfer into an image of the physical influence of light, but rather represents an interpretation all her own. In this sen se she is closer to associating with the understan ding of painting of the Expressionists, who at the start of the 20th Century departed from all modes of representation based purely on physical observa tion and knowledge. For them, it was rather a mat ter of making visible the world of their own feelings, which is why they bid farewell to any recognisability or "Naturalness". In this context, a true approach to nature did not take place; nor was it ever intended. Rather, the breakaway from local colour and the re jection of all art forms that had existed up to then in favour of a return to simple, "primitive" forms enabled them to achieve a new originality, which they discovered anew in their relation to nature. They were aware that this was the view from outside, the perspective of a feeling individual, that manifested itself in bright, sometimes aggressively apparent paintings. In Susan Swartz, by contrast, there occurs a synthesis of several artistic styles and elements, which emphasises this historical reconnection and conveys it into a contemporary image type which tends more and more towards abstraction. Her works appear particularly expressive when little is identified and much is left to vague suggestion. Susan Swartz again and again seeks motifs from na ture, and she is able to do this easily when, for ex ample, she has thin birch trees towering together densely, or when she converts colour phenomena in nature into image phenomena, as in "Purple Majesty 2" (2007). In breaking up rigid structures she mana ges, through the visible phenomena, to emphasise something from the landscape which is present yet not obvious in it. Intoxicating oneself with the play of nature in the luminous colour-changing foliage, in the familiar Indian summer, is nothing new. To in tensify this once again in painting is Susan Swartz's 'Jane Goodall, in: Susan Swartz, Natural revelations, Springville Museum of Fine Arts, 2010, no page reference 5 Susan Swartz in: Springville Museum of Fine Arts, 2010, no page reference 14 signature, however. Meanwhile, she differentiates subtly between concrete visibility and imaginative resolution of precise structures. For by emphasising tree trunks and foliage in the rhythm of the paint brush and the colour style, she withdraws nature from the viewer's direct access. The objects in her images oscillate precisely in this in-between area of thinka ble reality and conceivable imagination -between 15 concretion and emphasis. It remains a balancing act between a kind of painting which has already had its zenith, and the constant new discovery that at once postulates the challenge to approach the majestic powers of heavenly processes. It is a hymn to memo ry and an elegy to a planet doomed to destruction. Beate Reifenscheid Next >