– Recently, when I meet people who know me after a long period of time due to corona, times it often sounds to me: hausmeisterr, what does art do? and when I have some examples with me, perhaps even on my mobile phone, then it often says, oh, you’re pretending to be abstract. Not quite, I sometimes say, but before I have explained myself, the listeners strive for other goals. Dear reader, I hope you are sitting comfortably in your armchair and that you are the first person who really listens to me.
I have given the picture the name “the dancer”. Did I want to paint a dancer now, you ask ? No, I just wanted to paint a picture. This painting is not an abstraction of something already existing, concrete, but the negation of something concrete. This negation arises when I start without the intention of representation, i.e. when I paint the picture as a picture, using strokes and colours and surfaces, but only as itself, not as a means of representing something else. When the sheet has filled up in this way, I look at the finished picture, one could say the primary picture. In the conventional sense, actually the original and also the end of the artistic activity. But for me, this “original” is only the starting point of the artistic process, of “making the picture”. I try to find without searching for anything. Above all, I am looking for the picture within the picture, not necessarily the random concretions within the picture that keep appearing, but the art-like picture as part of and in the space of the primary picture. With this act of selection, if successful, one endows a new pictorial context with a new focus, which as a consequence of this intervention triggers a sequence of aesthetic decisions that establish the artistic character of the secondary image (to be continued in the next post).
