These paintings by Svenja Deininger follow a path of perceptual complexity. Hovering midway between figurative and abstract, the Austrian artist's works interweave various elements of a visual thought process built around recollected objects and sudden formal insights. The colours swim up through layer after layer of paint, among geometric segments and more gently abstract modular planes that flow together to create a final surface full of unexpected positive and negative spaces, an interplay of thicknesses and volumes. Process-based though they are, her works are not the result of any pre-established plan, and the only model that they follow is one established in real time, as it emerges. They are a record of movements that progress between real and mental scenarios, evolving urban contexts and undefined morphologies, juxtaposing the fluid planes of real-life experience with the intangible ones of the imagination.
Through this absence of a systematic approach, Deininger expresses her rejection of a strictly rationalist vision of painting.
Her rupture with it includes a move away from the principles of two-dimensional literalism that are a cornerstone of the abstract modernist syntax. It is the very structure of her paintings that makes allusions to three-dimensionality, through offset contours, colour fields built up in successive glazes, and stratifications of canvas. Her works become compendiums of tactile possibilities and architectural references, showing that this kind of abstract painting does not avoid dealing with the real world, but rather stems from a more intense dialogue with its contents. The recursive nature of certain shapes suggests a resemblance to concrete materials like wood or elements of decor, revealing a receptiveness to subterranean influences; in recent years the artist has divided her time between Vienna and Milan, two cities that have helped mould her gaze with their tradition of architecture and urban design.
Deininger maps out her paintings within a realm freely based on the processual composition of visual planes, without any self-referential indulgence in regard to techniques, materials, and the way they are combined. The perspective from which she operates is thus much more concrete than aesthetic: she uses the medium to lay out angles of vision that help foster a new and different perception of real-world shapes, focusing in particular on architectural context and the analogies between architecture and thought. Though these elements may bring Deininger into a kind of iconographic proximity to the concerns of the early twentieth-century Constructivist avant-garde, there is a clear difference between them, marked by an aspect that goes deeper than mere distance in time. Deininger constructs her works with an unpredictability that weds the rules of her practice - each painting is the end result of a careful gestation, a series of moments, rhythms and pauses - to her identity as an artist, in which the risk of rigidly dogmatic assertiveness is tempered by a touch of feminism. The forms she chooses, for instance, do not follow a scheme of clear-cut, upstanding autarky, but rather are oblique, inclined, and wavering. To echo the insightful feminist theories laid out by Adriana Cavarero in Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, one might say that in contrast to the upright, vertical posture found throughout the canon of Western thought and culture - an apodictic, selfÂsufficient one - the geometry of Deininger's paintings favours an inclination that seems off-axis, unpredictable, curvilinear. It harbours the potential to envision a more inclusive, open-ended subjectivity, aimed and inclined toward the possibility of an encounter with otherness, uncertainty, and human proximity.
This frame of reference may shed light on the meditative dialogue the artist has recently been carrying out with the work of Wladislaw Strzeminski (Minsk 1893 - Lodz 1952), a founding figure of Polish Constructivism. Strzeminski pursued an ideal harmony between drawing, colour and texture, striving for an optical dimension condensed into just a few shades and centred on the chromatic sensibility of the painted surface. The picture becomes an ideal, timeless form, a utopia that offers the world an idealized realm from which to draw an inspiring model of innovative, practical action. Strzeminski's aesthetic paradigm - a visionary, hierarchical one - envisages a perfect overlap of aims between thought, image, and picture plane, as if projecting a visual mirage, an asymptotic idea to aim for. The concept of two-dimensional form in Deininger's work is quite different, and this is only partly due to the previously mentioned rippling of the materials, the compromise between projecting and layered elements. More importantly, many of the formats that she employs, whether large or small, make room for a kind of mark that opens up the geometry to include non-perpendicular lines; they converge in varying ways on the planes of the canvas, suggesting a shape that protrudes, exposed, in a vulnerable, relational way. And so for Deininger, painting is not an ontological model, but rather a realm of encounter, along vectors that may be traced by chance and uncertainty: precarious qualities of everyday life that reflect human limitations, and whose whims are embraced by her artistic process.
Likewise, Deininger's art shows the development of a painting to be an act of thought moving through the world. This dimension is both analytical and emotional, based on recognition and intuitive improvisation, memory and engagement. The artist thus arrives at something akin to a form of writing, spelled out through the arrangement of the various works, whose juxtapositions determine the meaning of the pictorial statement. That is why the individual canvases never have titles; rather, the images and variations generated by the artist over the course of the work's evolution are what establish the final text presented to the viewer as a possible vision.
The enigma this artist explores is the riddle of language, the relationship between sign and content, between the formal autonomy of the individual works and their interaction as a whole. What is the relationship between representation and action in painting? Deininger's work is centred on the very act of the painting process, because its ultimate goal is a visual writing where the use of paint comes to resemble the creative act of language. In this sense, the artist's practice can be compared to the paradigm shift found in the philosophy of John L. Austin, which moves from the idea of language as representation to the concept of language as action. Austin's theory of speech acts, laid out in How to Do Things with Words, is founded on the premise that an utterance not only conveys content, but can be a genuine action in the communicative sphere. Pointing to the impossibility of clearly distinguishing between the spheres of description and action in. language, Austin demonstrates that every saying is also a doing, and that assertions have a true performative power.
In pictorial terms, this shift from the cognitive dimension to the realm of action can also be found in Deininger's images, which are not academic allusions to the history of abstraction, but rather a language that tries to absorb the potential forms of the world in order to reinvent them, rewrite them, and let them channel a concrete experience of reality. If stating a phrase is not enough to generate a complete discursive meaning it is because - the artist tells us - a progressive, ongoing effort of development and clarification is necessary. "Two thoughts" are always needed to open up new cognitive horizons, to lead painting to a moment of revelation that will renew itself over and over in the observer's gaze.
Deininger's compositions show us that every personal experience becomes reality by manifesting itself first as perceptions, then through elaborated linguistic forms. Body and language thus become nets cast out to capture experience, offering a shared basis of expression for a wide range of personal sensations and experiences. In The Nature of Sympathy, German philosopher Max Scheler wrote that it is the creators of language who shift the boundary of the unsayable and invisible, moving into unknown realms of experience and suggesting new ways of feeling and perceiving alongside the familiar ones prescribed by convention. It is hard not to see this idea as including the actions of art. And so if we extend Scheler's observations to the field of aesthetics, we see that art allows, to use his terms, a gradual conquest of the realm of intuition - the internal one of perception, and the external one of human constructions in this world, whether social or material. Art reveals possibilities of being that can be arrived at only by looking at existence from other points of view, expanding our perception of self and reality through new forms, words, and expressions. Seen in these terms of relational empathy, Deininger's works are like composite samples summing up a new way of understanding perceptual experience in this world, through channels and instruments that are constantly reinvented according to the artist's grammar of construction. And so the geometric revelations of her paintings - their spaces and forms - conjure up a specific idea of personality before the visitor's eyes: it is an action performed as part of a mission (a conscious, well studied rendering
of reality) that is always connected to her ultimate values (an inclusively concrete, non-metaphysical vision of painting), and springs from a well-pondered personal decision (art as a rigorous discipline). When these conditions are met, an artist becomes, without even intending to, a Personlichkeit, _a personality. To echo the words of Max Weber at the end of Science as a Vocation, she has found the daemon that holds the threads of her life and learned to obey it, carrying out the daily task that it sets her.