Beat Wismer PAINTING: ALBEIT A LONELY AFFAIR. (Deutsch) Remarks on the Work of Rudolf de Crignis Rudolf de Crignis is a radical painter. This simple assertion may seem banal but nonetheless we insist upon it as the starting point of these remarks, and we intentionally leave it uninflected with all the ambivalence thus implied: on the one hand, it is a general statement, an associative pointer, generalized and oversimplified; on the other, it addresses monochrome art, known since 1984 as Radical Painting. A particular of radical painting lies in its emphatic claim to autonomy, to its separation from language. It seeks to remain essentially inaccessible to the language of words and to make its intentions legible primarily through sensual visuai study. One of the most distinguished theoreticians of Radical Painting, Joseph Marioni, has repeatedly stressed the special nature ofthe beholder's role in such highly reduced painting, and when he writes that painting is by nature an experiential plase of solitude, he uses the word painting to mean not only the creation of the work in the artist's studio but also its reception through the viewers of an exhibition. Although the relationship between analytic language and radical painting, i.e. painting pared down to irreducible essences, is generally described as being strained (the two are often considered downright insompatible), secondary literature on the subiect has proliferated. The following remarks deal specifically with Rudolf de Crignis's painting, and do not intend to add substantially to the literature on radical painting. Rudolf de Crignis is not a theoretician; his art is hardly a visualized and certainly not an illustrative rendition of a theoretical program. Instead, his work embodies the ceaseless effort to render an inner idea that is basically visual and cannot be rendered in words. The artist's comments on his own work are as emphatic as they are vague, yet precise and succinct, as suits his character; they are largely restricted to what can easily be put into words, to the describable procedure underlying the absolutely real build-up of his paintings. When I visited his studio in New York last winter, he handed me a sheet of paper with dictionary definitions of five concepts that are central to his work. He had crossed out those aspects of the definitions that did not apply, though they were still legible. The concepts, not listed in alphabetical order, stake out a territory between depth and light and with the exception of the word surface, they all designate something immaterial. The first and last concepts define the goal of de Crignis's work; the three intermediate ones, surface, blue and space, refer to the means by which an inner idea might be committed to the outward form of a painting. It is de Crignis's goal as a painter to achieve pictorial depth through purely painterly means, which precludes using perspective to create illusionist depth or combining colors that each have a different effect. Instead, de Crignis creates pictorial depth by applying several layers of blue paint to a radiantly white and luminous chalk ground. From the deepest layer to the topmost skin, a linear zone in black is painted over every blue plane; inserted, so to speak, between the lower layers, it has room to operate between each plane. De Crignis paints the lines with a very fine brush, only to smear them immediately afterwards with a broad brush, while the paint is still wet. The extreme transparency that results gives the top layer the appearance of a membrane or skin. As it begins to interfere with the separately applied layers below, the picture surface is quickened with delicate vibrations and gentle resonance. (The artist's textremely delicate and restrained pencil drawings are similarly structured and have a comparable effect despite the complete lack of color. The effect of the black fields of delicately drawn and subsequently smeared lines in the paintings is generated in the drawings by reworking the delicately penciled lines with an eraser. This process of adding and subtracting yields a vibrant relationship between line and surface on the paper that verges on invisibility.) Viewers, as seeing and sentient beings, are faced with a great challenge; they must move in front of the picture or rather the visual object, as if in front of a body or a sculpture. Only in that way will the painting reveal its richness, only in that way will they succeed in taking a look behind the mirror. With his delicate and richly differentiated art- richly differentiated within the framework of highly restricted and reduced premises - Rudolf de Crignis manages to make compelling use of the inexhaustible potential of a painting that has been declared dead several times over in our century. Only with superficial bias couid one claim that the pioneers of monochrome art from Rodchenko and Malevich to Ad Reinhardt and in this context, especially Yves Klein - have exhausted the potential of radically autonomous and reduced painting. Such a stand undialectically fails to recognize that the reiterated declaration of the end necessarily contained a new beginning and, in fast, paved the way for profound expioration of previously unknown painterly avenues. Our century has seen a rampantly accelerating spiral of artistic expansion as art presses forward into ever new territories, but there is also another spiral that reaches down into deeper and deeper depths. This is the domain of artists, among them Rudolf de Crignis, who refuse to abandon the project of abstract painting prematurely, i.e., before its potential has indeed been expioited to the fullest. Their artistic agenda requires a willingness to address and commit oneself to the hard work and rewarding adventures of seeing with one's own eyes. As said before, language necessarily provides inadequate access to art of this kind, which is worked with a delicacy that lies on the brink of visibility (and reproducibility as well). The paucity of information in de Crignis's paintings is set off against their sensual impact and beauty. Instead of attempting to define what beauty is for those who ask, let us reply, with Goethe, "but I can show you!" |