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Ice-Cold Sex Appeal
What is the temper of Markus Weggenmann's paintings? A first encounter with the often times large-format, high-gloss images, with which he has attracted widespread attention in recent years, inevitably evokes ambivalent feelings. Though the impact of the works, conveyed largely through colour, is deeply sensual, they remain tangibly distant from the viewer, whose gaze bounces off the homogeneous, slightly reflecting surfaces. Controlled and aloof, Weggenmann's art exudes a curiously fascinating, cool eroticism not unlike that of early Hollywood stars such as Garbo or Dietrich, whose erotic appeal lay in their unattainability despite the accessibility of face and body guaranteed by the camera eye. For all their seductive powers, they spurn overture and are forever out of reach ? and this also applies to Markus Weggenmann's hot-cold paintings. They are subject through and through, autonomous actors in a dialogue with viewers who appreciate their beauty but cannot escape noticing their cool detachment.
There is no indication that one might ever be able to penetrate the flesh of this painting and discover what is hidden behind the facade. The immaculate, hermetic presence of the surfaces shows no irregularities; no signature, no texture of any kind mars the almost photographic smoothness. It would be absurd to anticipate the discovery of intimate details, initially hidden from view. Weggenmann's art is the quintessential embodiment of the computer phrase: “What you see is what you get.” There is nothing mysterious about the works, no sub rosa implications, no semantic depth, nothing to gratify the international art market's interest in profound German art. In this respect, Kiefer comes to mind as an artist whose weighty material treatment of German catastrophes and the work of mourning is celebrated worldwide as a new form of history painting. In contrast, Weggenmann's pictures codify neither history nor stories, not even the artist's own story. All we know about him, about the artifex absconditus of this imagery, are a few meagre biographical details ? that he was born in 1953 in Singen/Hohentwiel and was employed in a “therapeutic context” until the age of 34. (1) Originally trained as an occupational therapist, he worked in psychiatric clinics before opening his own psychoanalytical and psychotherapeutic practice in Zurich. Even the first paintings made in the mid-1980s are utterly devoid of anything personal, anything confessional, any form of introspection. Instead, Weggenmann has chosen a form of visual expression that is supra-individual in character, which may come as a surprise given his background. While earning his livelihood as a therapist, dealing in the psychodynamics of the unconscious and probing what lies behind appearances in order to understand the personalities of his patients, he restricted himself in his artistic output to the ‘objective' laws of colour, shape and surface, in other words, to manifest appearances.
No matter how one chooses to interpret the psychology of this inner compensation, it soon bore astonishing fruit. Weggenmann changed his profession and in 1989 embarked on his first major project as an artist. He introduced himself to the directors of the Zurich Kunsthaus and courageously proposed lending artistic visibility to the empty architectural planes on the facade of the building. He had bright-red metal frames, measuring 100 x 113 cm, placed around six projecting stones, so-called bosses. The architects had planned to sculpt the stones as decorative architectural elements, but the plan was actually only executed on one of the bosses. When Weggenmann, himself the son of a sculptor, discovered that the remaining stones had not been decorated, he proceeded to draw attention to them by having them framed. Conceptually this artistic act is indexical. A location, a place is brought to the fore with great precision but without the artist's personal and artistic intervention, in other words, without working the surface of the stone. Weggenmann resisted the temptation to take possession of the bosses, to impose on them his own expression, thereby leaving behind the imprint of personal traces.
In this respect he has consistently remained true to himself. His artistic approach has not changed nor has his interest in colour, so forcefully expressed in the Zurich project. Admittedly, on the Kunsthaus facade, he used colour primarily in the service of a higher goal, namely to focus the gaze on the bosses. Nonetheless, the luminous colouring of the frames lent them a self-referential presence, which Weggenmann was to cultivate later in works made in the studio. By 1992, when he began making his series of ‘striped paintings', colour had definitely taken centre stage and it has been the artist's main concern ever since.
The striped series consists mostly of small- or medium-format works on paper and canvas, covered entirely with horizontal bands of colour. In applying the paint, Weggenmann avoids any arbitrary gestural action, strictly implementing the self-imposed brief of mechanically adding one stripe after the other. Occasional irregularities ? as seen in the slightly bulging lineation of some pictures ? are caused by the necessity of applying several coats of paint. To achieve maximum luminosity, Weggenmann reduces the binding medium, the cellulose glue, which means that he has to paint over each stripe as often as four times, as one brushstroke would never yield the striking presence of colour in these paintings. Weggenmann aims to create opaque, deeply luminous stripes of perfectly even colour utterly devoid of modulation and nuances. The cultivation of subtle painterly transitions gives way to incisiveness and contrast. The abrupt collision of brightness and temperature between the two to four colours used in the striped paintings clearly shows a structural kinship with hard edge painting. As in this art form, at home largely in the United States among such proponents as Josef Albers or Frank Stella, Weggenmann's work seeks to simplify the visual inventory, which is expressed in plainly delineated colours and shapes with no further differentiation.
A case in point is the striped painting Boulevard No. 46 of 1993. It consists of a sequence of four stripes, one a yellowish green, two in different reds and a grey one, repeated three times from top to bottom. Since both the yellowish green and a darker red stripe make a fourth appearance, suggesting a continuation of the colour sequence, the painting can be read as part of a larger system, which can be extended towards the top and towards the bottom and most certainly sideways. These are the visual findings that might result from an analytical approach. Weggenmann's paintings are, however, anything but intellectual exercises. They are visions incarnate of sensual experience, driven by the interplay of colours. Josef Albers spoke in this context of the “interaction of colour”, (2) the activation of colours through their ? not necessarily harmonious ? mutual atonement or reference to each other. Similar strategies are encountered in Weggenmann's striped paintings but his interest in the way colours interact is less motivated by theory than it is in the case of Albers. As Daniel Kurjakovic astutely observes, he proceeds “emotionally and intuitively” and does not follow a “set of rules”. (3) The artist himself speaks about experimental setups that lay no claim to definitive legitimacy. The striped paintings explore the potential of colour combinations, trying out how they work without seeking to establish hermetic visual systems.
In consequence, the works can also be variously combined, a possibility Weggenmann has often exploited. The most remarkable demonstration of their combinatorial cogency can be seen in his installation in the Uetlihof administrative headquarters of Credit Suisse in Zurich. There he has created his largest work to date: 192 canvases that form a wall of colour 23.30 meters in height and 6.40 in width. Tribute to the Stripes, as he calls this piece, can never be seen in its entirety, generating constant changes in focus that offer viewers a richly varied and iridescent experience. Viewers might study a particular, small portion of the whole or stand apart to take in a larger portion from a distance, but being unable to grasp the work as a whole, they will never discover a larger, defining structure, such as an underlying colour concept. Weggenmann does not approach colour systematically; he does not force his chromatic painting to submit to formal principles. Form, namely the horizontal stripe, is the only conceptual precondition. The choice of colours is free and spontaneous; they speak for themselves in combinations that utterly disregard normativity and finality, no matter how in tune they may seem to be.
Weggenmann is obviously not a conceptual artist but a sensualist whose art enables colour to come into its own ? with potent consequences. Hence, colour no longer functions exclusively as a means of expressing an artist's ego; it is instead defined as an autonomous and extremely compelling agent that dominates the picture plane. This is, of course, especially true of the high-gloss, spray-painted works that he has been making since 1999. Through the use of auto paint, whose brilliance is often enhanced by adding miniscule bits of metal or synthetic mother-of-pearl, Weggenmann's works achieve a presence and an aesthetic perfection that even outshines the striped paintings. As mentioned, the latter occasionally show slight irregularities caused by the manual application of the paint, therefore revealing the hand of the artist, while the paintings of recent years are characterized by the unadulterated self-referentiality of colour cultivated in a complex process of production.
Point of departure are small format, intensely chromatic works on paper, produced in large quantities in the studio. (4) They become the artist's source material, which he narrows down, making a selection for further processing, scanning them into the computer and modifying them both formally and chromatically until the composition makes the anticipated and desired impact. Having decided on the format, Weggenmann projects the design onto an aluminium panel covered with a white primer. The shapes are then outlined on the surface and when the protective film has been removed, the actual painting is professionally produced in a spray-paint workshop in a process that includes repeated polishing and finally sealing the work with several layers of transparent varnish.
That, in any case, describes the technical and handcrafted aspect of creating the high-gloss paintings, but in terms of their content, the process might be described as a “cooling off” or even as “sublimation”. The spontaneous, expressive and subjective nature of the designs acquires a presence that is of almost supra-individual visual cogency. The works show no traces of the subjective act of creation. Indeed, what more compelling evidence of the de-subjectivation that constitutes the autonomy of the work (as the subject!) can be found than the fact that the painting is completed by another artisan. The anonymous spray painter hence ratifies the process of objectivation that culminates in the impeccable and unstoried (given the hidden genesis of the work) sovereignty of the painting. (5)
Viewers are confronted with a presence of unqualified self-evidence and incontestability, eloquently testifying to art that can never be a playing field for the imagination, a repository for our longings or a sanctuary for our feelings. There is nothing that invites us to become engaged, underscoring Weggenmann's own appraisal of his work as “really ... anti-Rothko”. (6) Sovereign and self-contained, it is indeed diametrically opposed to the spirit of Rothko's paintings that engage us in the act of looking. Rothko's spaces of colour create a visual score, in which seeing and thinking are pleasurably held captive. Since Rosenblum, we know that this approach is clearly indebted to the visual heritage of Romanticism, a heritage that is utterly alien to Weggenmann. (7) Portentous depths give way to unabashed recognisability; the sense of process and movement in spaces of iridescent colour gives way to the absolute presence of radiant patches of colour.
A case in point: No. 381, a recent work of 2008, whose main structural feature is slightly irregular squares and rhombuses. They pile up, starting with white reserved spaces in a grey ground, moving on to pink shapes and then three deep red areas that instantly strike the eye. The effect is obviously intentional because the entire composition is staged to achieve it. There is no denying that Weggenmann wants the painting to make an instantaneous impact since he has drastically reduced the work of reception by eschewing all the subtlety of the painter's craft, from tonal nuances to the modulation of the brushstroke. In fact, can the word ‘painting' even be applied to Weggenmann's art? If the genre of painting is defined as the product of the painting act and if the painting act means working with a paintbrush, then traditionalists may certainly have their doubts. Too little is the manual craft and too great the technology that has gone into the making of his pictures, they might argue. And these works are indeed to be seen as a hybrid visual art that brilliantly unites the warmth of painting with the coldness of technique.
It is this combination that makes Weggenmann's oeuvre so contemporary. He does not take sides in the somewhat stale debate that pits ‘warm', sensuous material painting against ‘cool' technically advanced computer and media art. Weggenmann's hot and cold painting overrides such trench warfare by deftly bringing the antipodes together. The above-mentioned ‘cooling-off process' is not so radical as to render the work purely cold and decorative. It goes hand-in-hand with a vitality of colour and the visual tension generated by the thoroughly considered compositions that Weggenmann values so highly. He guarantees the singularity of the work without the need to impregnate it ‘from without' by means of a brush stroke that documents the artist's signature. Rather, the pictures come to life on their own, as it were, through the interplay of colour and form, as shown in Painting no. 114 of 2002. Against a beige-ochre ground, a triad of related oranges and reds engages in a choreography of attraction and repulsion that is paraphrased in the interlocked shapes. Intertwined like the arms of an octopus, they merge into a complete whole that retains the energy of its components. Instead of resolving the agreement and opposition of the shapes, their push and pull, Weggenmann characteristically exploits that tension to heighten the vibrancy of the composition. Therein lies the individuality of works of art that do not represent or render subjectivity but rather make room for it to evolve as an aesthetic category.
This is confirmed by the fact that not a rigid geometry but rather an organic flow informs the interplay of shapes. The organic shapes that hold sway in Weggenmann's car enamel paintings sometimes even evoke figurative associations, for instance when reserved spaces outlined in green suddenly appear to resemble the abstract shape of a lemon. The beauty of the ensemble recalls Matisse's still lifes and, even more so perhaps, the great French master's decoupages, specifically the flatness of the shapes in concert with the background, which conspires to enhance their already rampant vitality. They are the embodiment, the lifeblood of works that have acquired an even greater inner vitality in recent years. The curlicued, looping and twisting pictures of recent years transport viewers into positively psychedelic rapture, conjured, for instance, by the installation that Weggenmann designed for his exhibition at Onrust Gallery in Amsterdam (2008).
In this installation, titled Vom Traum der Schlittschuhlauferin auf der Eisgracht (The Ice Skater and Her Dream on the Eisgracht), pulsating and rotating circular shapes not only cover the entire longer wall of the gallery, as seen in photographs, but also the floor, on which the artist has placed a large-format carpet of similar composition. The latter, a hybrid between a utilitarian item and a work on display, plays an important role within the framework of Weggenmann's overall treatment of space. Reinforcing the spatial impact of his art, the carpets that he has been making since 2005 also testify to his will to expand.
These unique pieces made out of wool bridge the gap between art and handicraft but without completely crossing the boundary. Though they lie on the floor and can be walked on, they still impart the aura of an image. Rarely does anyone dare to step on them in the context of an exhibition, a reluctance heightened by the delight in looking at them, which inevitably overrides their tactile appeal.
Hence, the carpets, like the paintings, articulate the aloofness, the noli me tangere, that ensures the autonomy of Weggenmann's works. With all their sensuality and visual seduction, they still lead a life of their own, a life in which we too can participate, though only as onlookers.
Christoph Schreier
Translation: Catherine Schelbert
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