Drawing the Edge of a Cloud
When one is familiar with his previous reverse glass paintings and their motifs, the title of Thilo Westermann’s current exhibition, “Joie de vivre,” might seem unsettling at first. From pictures of vanity to pictures expressing a lust for life - the two visual concepts could hardly be more opposite. The high gloss, halftoned, and pin sharp “Vanitas” series has now met its counterpart. The infusion of colour in his latest work seems to have set the forms free. And through the use of colour, Westermann’s precise, extremely time-consuming drawing technique becomes independent.
In these colourful drawings we see the same graphical microstructure as in the “Vanitas” artworks. This time however, he does not use the halftoning technique to produce photographic clarity of his subject but rather to form a subject that defies the confines of identity. Despite the extreme accuracy of Westermann’s drawings, the subject remains elusive. They are not, however, abstract drawings because they depict familiar forms and structures as opposed to pure artistic constructions. Certain visual characteristics of some of the drawings seem to be confirmed by their titles, for example, “Azure” or “Grass Green.” But when looking at the titles of other pieces in this series, these seemingly safe assumptions about content, colour, and title become questionable. If the titles of Westermann’s drawings derive from the depicted objects, why is a drawing named “Warm Grey” although it depicts something that would more suitably be called “Rock Grey” or “Stone Grey”? But then it becomes clear: The drawings are titled according to the colour of the crayon with which they were produced. The titles keep the drawings, and the presentation of these drawings, in a state of suspense.
Here the relationship between line and plane seems to be understood in opposition to the conventional terms of drawing. The line does not outline a form but the form develops from the line. The multitude of dots, strokes, and lines produce a figure, a form, or a certain surface structure. The line does not separate the figure from the subject but embodies it. What Gottfried Boehm has written about George Seurat’s drawings also applies to Westermann’s works: “He draws with the shadow before he forms contours and lines with it.”
Generally concrete in meaning, drawing here becomes an instrument to put the subject in limbo and to hold it there in a vague state of uncertainty. The technical accurateness of Westermann’s pictures opposes the indeterminable motif as well as the undefined viewpoint. Are his drawings close-up views or panorama views? Which position does the viewer take? Is he sitting in front of a microscope or is he looking out of a space shuttle? Does he observe the surface of a petal or of the world? Perhaps he observes the edge of a cloud though Michel Serres wrote, “Nobody has the ability to draw the edge of a cloud, this borderland of randomness where particles are trembling and melting, at least in our eye’s view."
Moreover, drawing is supposed to be the paradigmatic medium of artistic subjectivity. In this series, Westermann’s drawings undermine this supposition – here the line is not the immediate trace of emotions and not the place of the artist’s expression but the testimonial of his self-discipline and power of endurance. The extreme accurateness and the absence of spontaneous and subjective symbols simultaneously suggest the self-abandonment of the artist and his subservience regarding his work. You almost feel the duration of production, the gradual growth of the drawing, of swellings and sinkings, of agglomerations and cavities. Spatial expansion seems to document temporal elongation. You really can see the time that is stored in Westermann’s pictures.
By being at first excluded from the drawings, the viewer becomes the topic. One is confronted with one’s own apperception. The viewer suddenly becomes aware of his strategies of classification. The usually unconscious search for terms to name the observed phenomenon, i.e. the search for stereotypes to classify the objects seen, becomes clearly conscious by being disturbed. The pictures offer the possibility of a “seeing sight,” as Max Imdahl calls it. That means that the viewer becomes conscious of his own seeing by seeing something. “Seeing sight” is the opposite of denotative sight, which identifies the viewed objects by connecting them to verbal terms – I see a flower and recognize “flower” or even its name like “orchid” or “Phalaenopsis.” With “seeing sight” I become aware of my own process of seeing and primarily see a variety of colours and shapes and perceive an atmosphere.
Robert Musil’s chapter called “Moonbeams by Sunlight” in the book “Man Without Qualities” elaborates exactly on this point. At first Musil describes a certain way of observing nature in a very special mood which increases the quality of perception to an extraordinary extent. This depiction of a simultaneous perception of depth, acuity, and equivocality of the perceived object corresponds to the experience you can make by looking at Westermann’s drawings. Musil writes:
“The colours and shapes which presented themselves were dissolved and fathomless though highlighted like a bouquet of flowers which floats on dark water. They were much more acutely defined than usual but in a way you could not explain if it was because of the clearness of appearance or because of deeper emotion. The impression not only belonged to the succinct field of apperception and mindfulness but also to the vague field of emotion; and that is what made it hovering between inside and outside like the bated breath between exhalation and inhalation, and made it impossible to decide if this impression was owned by the physical world or merely by increased solicitousness.”
In opposition to his old habits Ulrich, the man without qualities, finds neither beginning nor end by observing flowers or single blossoms:
“If he did happen to know the name [of the flower] he got rescued from the sea of infinity. [...] Though if he did not know the name, he called the gardener who gave him the unknown name to put things straight again. Then the age-old magic which gave protection against the untamed barbarism of entities again turned out to be as powerful as ten thousand years before. But sometimes it happened that Ulrich faced a twig or a flower helplessly and not even Agathe was present with whom he could have shared the suspense. Then it seemed totally impossible to him to understand the bright green of a young leaf; and the mystical defined plenty of shapes of a flower became a never-ending circle of infinite variety.”
This points to the one’s powerlessness to clearly describe with words a colour or a shape, which speaks for itself in such a vividly thoughtless way. “Because in this situation a word does not cut and the fruit stays on the branch. Nevertheless, you almost felt it in your mouth.” Language cannot capture the inimitability and specificity of sense perception. As Ulrich states, every attempt of understanding assumes a kind of shallowness because the primary experiences are not being understood singly and isolated from each other but one by means of the other. That is why they do not become connected in a deeper sense but only at the surface.
“It sounds very certain if I state that this lawn right here before us is green. But in fact I did not said much – not more as if I had told you that a passing man is a member of the family Green. And, Lord, how many kinds of green do exist! So it had been even better if I contented myself with the finding that this green lawn is grass green or even it is as green as a lawn after the rain. [...] Perhaps I could measure the colour: It might have the wavelength of a five hundred and forty millionth millimetre; so now this green must be captured and determined to a certain point! But it escapes again because this colour of the lawn also has a certain kind of substance which the mere name of the colour does not include at all because it is a sort of green totally different from those of silk or wool. But now we again have the insight that green grass is grass-green.”
This insight is not as simple as it seems at first. It rather broaches the issue of what Westermann’s drawings question in a sensuous as well as visual way: the indissoluble difference between the search for meaning and sensuousness, i.e. the difference between rational perception and sense. The indeterminacy of meaning of Westermann’s drawings makes our search for verbalization fail by hovering above a clear lexical definition. His drawings ingeniously point out the fact that if we see something we see something as something.
Simultaneously a space develops in which the view might get involved with obscureness, vagueness, complexity and ambiguousness – where the picture is rather an atmosphere than a sign. Therefore, the drawings challenge the viewer. They demand a detailed examination, a visual scanning, and the effort to see without the will to identify instantaneously. Feel free to take a moment of “seeing sight” and leave yourself to colour effects, logic of structures, and the resulting atmospheres! Those who do not try, will not see much.
Bernhard Waldenfels wrote about the chapter of Musil cited above that it orbits around the “inscrutability of sensuousness” and presents a “discourse on the cusp of the senses where also the pictures live.” Westermann’s drawings bring this threshold between language and sensuousness home to us.
(Melanie Sachs, Aesthetics and Art history at University of Leipzig, opening address)
For further information please visit www.thilowestermann.com