Norton museum of art, palm beach, USA
It is we, the living, who walk in a world of phantoms, said the 19th century French poet Gérard De Nerval. De Nerval’s life existed somewhere between a lucid dream and madness. Somewhere in-between this polarity was an ineffable space where he felt the miracle of poetry existed. For De Nerval, written verses were not a hymn to beauty, nor its description or mirror, but beauty itself, with all of its imagined colors, fragrances, and forms1.
Form; a noun used to describe the visual shape or configuration of something. Characters (letters) accumulate on the blank page one shape at a time, eventually coalescing into sentences, grammatical structure, and the essence of rampant thoughts. Within this delineated space on the page there exists a freedom to cross a threshold where the unseen is revealed as much as it is contained.
Much like cursive writing, painting in the 21st century is in its truest sense, an anomaly. In spite of technological advancement, automation, and the speed of mass production and distribution, painting has survived its very own obsolescence. Its continuum has more links than the Internet; the mediums literary simpatico goes back a long time. Can you imagine what kind of impression the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphosis left on artists of antiquity?
Consider the above literary associations when assaying the pictures of Svenja Deininger and the inaudible pulses of her corporeal forms. Their physical directness are tempered by subtle changes of color and shapes, all in pursuit of the elusive. Alone in her top floor Vienna atelier high above the sound of a street trolley in the environs of a 19th century edifice numerous paintings are at various stages of production. It is here where accumulating layers of color transform into spatial configurations that are often the result of chance and a vigilant attention to detail.
A visit with the artist leads to discussions about a philosophical way of thinking about painting. For Deininger, painting is like writing one sentence at a time or the memory of something leaving a trail of thoughts. As these “thoughts” are concretized through color, the colors are what define the material rather than the shape. Each form is a left over from a process that’s already happened and repeats itself in other paintings. A correspondence between pictures ensues; a lost thread here, a detail there expanded or contracted according to format and scale.
An entry point for the exhibition Second Chances, First Impressions is the large vertical oil on canvas Untitled, 2014. Dominated by the bold Ferrari red that curls just so at certain point its “held” up by the narrow black form. At its outermost edges, the black line decomposes from the two colored hard edges on its left side. Slightly bleeding into a field of pearlescent white the same gradation occurs as this “open” field of soft white meets an ornamental curlicue interrupting its progression towards the right edge.
A more hard white below protrudes like a belly pushed into a geometric block. Clearly there is another painting existing beneath the surface, allowed to coexist as a painting within a painting. The ornament is the result of over-painting a large expanse of reddish brown, now demarcated by the movement of a delineated line underscored by a hard red line extended at the bottom.
This painting sets the tone for the linear progression of the exhibition, with its surprising variation of patterns. Every exhibition of Deininger is the beginning of a new “sentence”. Where the design of the installation is concerned, of paramount importance is the strategic placement of each painting to emphasize the correspondences to each individual work within a given architectural dimension. If need be, she alters the configuration. Understanding this, you’ll note the jump from big to small canvases is not by whim, nor is the progression of vertical/horizontal or shaped structural formats a random choice.
What is random is the way a color scheme takes hold, gets altered or obfuscated by overworked transitions, shadows, and proportions. That is where improvisatory decisions are made as each painting develops a characteristic, however idiosyncratic that may be. As forces of natural phenomena within self-controlled parameters, the resulting impressions can’t help themselves to become what they must become. They take on a logic of their own through collisions that morph into asymmetries or soft edges meeting straight lines. Still, don’t imagine Svenja’s paintings through purely abstract geometries and blocks of gradient colors from a classical/modern palette tuned into the ramifications of digital color and the quirks of stock photography. These works are about their own self-reflexivity as painting first, and in dialog with the whole spectrum of the medium. Thus you get in Deininger hints of the interlocking patterns and modest scale of Tomma Abts, the wavy spatial fragmentations in the 1980’s paintings of the late Deborah Remington, and the unorthodox asymmetry of Mary Heilmann. Consider the nuances of the small, “Untitled”, 2014. A hush of cerulean and cobalt blues has usurped a truncated brownish rectangle bisected by a curvy pinkish beige that resembles the partial outline of the figure 8. A long milk white space to the left is disrupted by a small curve of distressed brown buttressing the uppermost black block. On the lower right corner a left over pink shading and baby blue line reveal the under painting that didn’t make it out to the next layer.
Two specific fixations distinguish Svenja Deininger from many of her “abstract” contemporaries. One is the anthropomorphic contours that suggest a body, the other distinction is a peculiar way with color that always seem to be on the verge of changing, like molten lava having erupted then cooled down into a solid. The patterns she develops could, by osmosis, be influenced by the urban landscape of Baroque, Biedermeir, and Jugendstil buildings. In present day Vienna, the past is current as a part of the cultural fabric. This point leads to the epiphany in Svenja’s paintings; that architecture is concretely another facet of influence on her vocabulary of colors that demand to be forms.
Leafing through, Italo Modern, Architecture in Upper Italy 1946-1976 2 can give you insights into Deininger’s innate understanding of how space comes together in unexpected ways. The book (which has a cult following in the architecture and design fields) features commentary, color photographs, and a floor plan of each building often designed by obscure architects. In its pages are mostly exterior shots of public and private spaces, residential and office buildings, bridges and overpasses. Variety and texture are evident, solutions to structural problems ingenious. The way a window or stairwell counterbalances the height and length of a wall; the placing of a drainpipe running down the corner of a monochromatic three story building looking like an elegant pinstripe detail. The marble flooring of an office lobby harmonious with its curved corridor, venetian plaster ceiling, and bank of globe lights. There is a modest grandeur to these buildings, built for form and function to serve its inhabitants.
In simple geometries lie complex structures painstakingly arranged. The all white “Untitled”, 2016 has little splotches of red poking through the thick surface. You can see how much its been thickly re-worked with overt lines and intersecting cambers. Optically speaking, is it a rabbit or a duck? Perhaps a Madonna and child? Another picture is grounded by gradients of chartreuse (“Untitled”, 2016) a dense brown, off and hard white, and a bubblegum pink block. Is it a building structure or a female torso wearing a hoop skirt on a designer chair? Such pictures immediately grab you even as they throw you off with subconscious allusions to the human figure. The body subsumed into architectonic volume, line, and structure. This fracture between realism and abstraction leads me to recount an anecdote by art historian Barbara Rose, who was wife to the young Frank Stella. While on a museum visit in Spain the artist was smitten by Francisco de Zurbarán’s St. Hugo in the Refectory (1633), originally painted for the Carthusian order founded by St. Bruno. The angled structure of the folds in the tablecloth, monk robes, and the lines of the garments in the painting no doubt are an asymmetrical balancing act. As an example of chance leading to fate, Stella went on the paint his irregular polygons expanding upon these compelling details.
Detail, as a verb, with object. Object; noun. A material thing that can be seen and touched. Can you put a name to a phenomenological condition that can be seen and felt? Svenja chooses her words very carefully, thus her paintings remain “untitled” while her exhibitions very specific titles encapsulate as a whole a feeling about them. They’re subtle clues that sneak up and disarm you from the information overload. One Second Balance, Untitled/Head, Every Something Is An Echo of Nothing; all evocatively speak to the mind through the written word and the suggestion of open ended subjectivity.
Yes, we live in a world of phantoms. Its up to the artist to turn such illusory shadows from a figment of the imagination to the ultimate high art where life vibrantly unfolds. Embedded in these individualistic paintings is a compression of time; the clock runs backwards on some days, forward on others. For time no longer belongs to the linear invention of man, but to the sensorial expanding and contracting of our place on terra firma. If an hourglass runs out of sand, you flip it around. That rupture where chronological time stops is a condition unto itself, like a Giorgio Morandi still life repeated yet never the same. And by the power of temporal inversion there is a potential that second chances do indeed leave a first impression for every day is renewal.
1 The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Arthur Symons
2 Martin & Werner Feiersinger, Italo Modern: Architektur In Oberitalien, 1946-1976, Springer, Wien/New York