In looking at images that evoke rather then represent by figuration we are left to ponder. Our enquiry is rendered heedless, distanced by the necessity of striving to construe meaning; eventually the gaze finds itself locked into a mysterious interlude, unsure of how to proceed to deepen meaning, or how to pursue narration without the aid of those signs that help representation. We are simultaneously left stranded and derided. Hovering in this stasis, the mind wanders, visually groping, scrutinising the corners and the edges of that which we face in order to glean something from it, so that we can approach the work knowingly and calmly address the anxiety that it evokes from its initial unrecognisability This has been the prevailing condition, in viewing much of what has been termed as abstract art, a term which has come to represent a turn in the mid-twentieth century, specifically applied to the school of painting. Abstrac tion has become renowned as an intervention, one so forceful that it is even mandatory, in a plethora of artists work from the period that followed the Second World War. Abstraction came to be recognised as part of the aftershock, a much needed venting and an expression that tended to illustrate the atrocities of collective experiences especially in the western world. Proponents and admirers of abstract art proclaimed its advent as the dawn of a period of freedom. Its main explorers and exponents saw its advances as a vigorous attack on the long and settled notion of art dominated by concepts of representation. An attack on the interiority of art. Dwelling in a prolonged guarded space, art had remained solely bounded by its power to represent by the use of figuration, set in continual motion by the saturation of pictorial inventions as a programme through which to narrate. The unfathomable avant-garde of the twentieth century shaped by its sudden abandonment of the figurative. pre-empted an unfolding, leading to a critical drama with its own prologue. This criticality was shaped by this reception, providing both new heroes and new villains, but more interestingly, new terms which started to float in the ether surrounding its critical inception. Specific terms grasped the recesses, even the extraterritorial, in an attempt to extrapolate meaning. Terms which frequently used notions of the borderless, developed further termi nologies which included the memorable use of “inscapes”, the profound “happenings and the congenial “spiritual spaces etc. A sense of the extraneous started to develop both as a form of linguistic and semantic sensuality-a sensuality that tried to frame the times, where freedom was obliquely grasped from the vast follies of continental fascism. The consequence of such a deviation as “letting go”, can be termed as a historical rupture. This allowance, an unadulterated, (un)pictorial interpretation, allowed a new set of framing strictures. The desire was to provide a set of new tools and to enable the critical measurement of the visual impact produced by abstraction’s sensuality; a set of tools by which to possess, to assist in construing meaning, for the discerning viewer, collector, critic, student and history itself
The work of Berlin based artist Ulrich Volz, is similarly committed to interpretations that have emerged from this discourse, of spatial concerns about the organisation of colour. Volz’s larger works are often structured to create a relationship between the colours, in the way tension between marks and negative spaces are used to make a meaningful dialogue. Here the totalising mannerisms and experiments, so fore-grounded by his predecessors including Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Goodnough are further influenced’ by CY Twombly-like choreographic lines. Volk, in providing these contrasting set of spaces, provides a sense of dispersal, especially of energies. The presence of loud spectral spaces dispersed with dark and light areas provides a network of atmospheres. Darkness and lightness, loudness and silence seem to be the main senses which are cultivated. These duel analogies of atmosphere and contrast persist in many of his works, embellished by a fibrous structure which helps maintain the relationship that the artist wishes to evoke in his translation of the world. One interesting facet or event associated with Volz’s paintings, can seem to stem from his long goal which he has pursued in his work within the community. Volz’s commitment is to a local life, organised as an open dialogue within which communities are able to realise their creativity and share the pleasure of art and art-making. (2) This conjecture provides an interesting point in understanding Volz’s attitudes as to why an artist needs to use the forms available in his/her life to both contrast the multiple roles of these areas and to further create a provision for an expressive other. In reading his work an entangled facility, sited somewhere between a dialogue and a translation within a shared space, one begins to understand the place of the wanderer and the safe place in which to rest. In Volz’s canvases, the eye is allowed to wander the surface looking for clues, constantly travelling in search of clues that sometimes might, and sometimes do, facilitate an interpretation. A further formal invention, which entitles the reader to an interpretative stance results from allowing the gaze to follow the line of the panels, which are sewn together to form the large format canvases. This panelling provides a secondary structure- a concerted looking for the line’ that both discourages a holistic space but simultaneously remains a guiding part of our survey. A constant, which both interrupts and divides the search, one which starts and stops the process of interpretation. We become impotent in this stop/start mode, always trying to retrieve meaning when maybe none exists or maybe attempting to analyse when nothing needs to be resolved. The artist often paints from many directions onto the untreated canvas laid out on the studio floor, to further seek an image that has a continuous space to go beyond and beneath the remits of the allocated area of the canvas or painterly marks. In incorporating the history of his space and his actions as part of the work, he suggests “without the aid of a stretching framewhich leads to unusual effects….. the paint takes on patterns from the floor surface and sparks something new as the colours blend into each other at the edges, with watercolor-like effect. Figures, objects and faces are not directly represented, but the viewer may find allusions to them in the flow and loading of the paint. Frisky swirls structure the surface of some canvasses. They serve as foreign objects in the paintings and turn the background into a wall.” (3)
1 Irving Sandler on Joan Mitchell, pg 42, School of New York: Some younger artists edited by B.H.Friedman Grove Press,Inc. 1959, New York 2 Volz, works with the large canvas works, laid out on his studio floor and attacked’ from all sides, the drips often intermingling to form a net like foreground against the previously laid groundwork. In the process, the floorboards of his studio start to leave certain impressions as the paint starts to dry. 3 The process of working on the floor is both an attitude and an allowance of the floor to help construct an image. This duality can be examined closely by the somewhat checkered backgrounds that proliferate some of the canvas works, providing clues to the architectural and man-made surfaces that they allude to- but the mixture of planes and against the organic flows of paint drips, one begins to casually fluctuate between the various clues and gaps present as a final image. Shaheen Merali Shaheen Merali is a curator and writer based in Berlin and London. Between 2003-08 he was Head of Department for Exhibitions,Film and New Media at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, where he curated the exhibitions The Black Atlantic, Dreams and Trauma, Moving images and the Promised Lands and Re-Imagining Asia, One Thousand years of Separation. In 2008, he was given the new role of artistic director for the very first contemporary Indian art gallery in Germa ny, BodhiBerlin for which he curated Blindstars, Starsblinds, a monograph exhibition on Shilpa Gupta, and and the seminal Everywhere is War (and rumors of war) for BodhiMumbai, India, Previously in 2006, he was the co-curator of the 2006 6th Gwangju Biennale of Korea. In February 2009, the large-scale historical show, The Untold (the rise of) Schisms, will open at Alcala 31 in Madrid accompanied by a publication that traces the rise of the political right within popular Indian culture and its neigh bouring regions, Merali has edited several volumes, including Far Near Distance, Contemporary Positions for Iranian Artists (2004); Spaces and Shadows, Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia and about Beauty (2005); New York States of Mind and Re- Imagining Asia (Sagi Books 2007)
The work of Berlin based artist Ulrich Volz, is similarly committed to interpretations that have emerged from this discourse, of spatial concerns about the organisation of colour. Volz’s larger works are often structured to create a relationship between the colours, in the way tension between marks and negative spaces are used to make a meaningful dialogue. Here the totalising mannerisms and experiments, so fore-grounded by his predecessors including Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Goodnough are further influenced’ by CY Twombly-like choreographic lines. Volk, in providing these contrasting set of spaces, provides a sense of dispersal, especially of energies. The presence of loud spectral spaces dispersed with dark and light areas provides a network of atmospheres. Darkness and lightness, loudness and silence seem to be the main senses which are cultivated. These duel analogies of atmosphere and contrast persist in many of his works, embellished by a fibrous structure which helps maintain the relationship that the artist wishes to evoke in his translation of the world. One interesting facet or event associated with Volz’s paintings, can seem to stem from his long goal which he has pursued in his work within the community. Volz’s commitment is to a local life, organised as an open dialogue within which communities are able to realise their creativity and share the pleasure of art and art-making. (2) This conjecture provides an interesting point in understanding Volz’s attitudes as to why an artist needs to use the forms available in his/her life to both contrast the multiple roles of these areas and to further create a provision for an expressive other. In reading his work an entangled facility, sited somewhere between a dialogue and a translation within a shared space, one begins to understand the place of the wanderer and the safe place in which to rest. In Volz’s canvases, the eye is allowed to wander the surface looking for clues, constantly travelling in search of clues that sometimes might, and sometimes do, facilitate an interpretation. A further formal invention, which entitles the reader to an interpretative stance results from allowing the gaze to follow the line of the panels, which are sewn together to form the large format canvases. This panelling provides a secondary structure- a concerted looking for the line’ that both discourages a holistic space but simultaneously remains a guiding part of our survey. A constant, which both interrupts and divides the search, one which starts and stops the process of interpretation. We become impotent in this stop/start mode, always trying to retrieve meaning when maybe none exists or maybe attempting to analyse when nothing needs to be resolved. The artist often paints from many directions onto the untreated canvas laid out on the studio floor, to further seek an image that has a continuous space to go beyond and beneath the remits of the allocated area of the canvas or painterly marks. In incorporating the history of his space and his actions as part of the work, he suggests “without the aid of a stretching framewhich leads to unusual effects….. the paint takes on patterns from the floor surface and sparks something new as the colours blend into each other at the edges, with watercolor-like effect. Figures, objects and faces are not directly represented, but the viewer may find allusions to them in the flow and loading of the paint. Frisky swirls structure the surface of some canvasses. They serve as foreign objects in the paintings and turn the background into a wall.” (3)
1 Irving Sandler on Joan Mitchell, pg 42, School of New York: Some younger artists edited by B.H.Friedman Grove Press,Inc. 1959, New York 2 Volz, works with the large canvas works, laid out on his studio floor and attacked’ from all sides, the drips often intermingling to form a net like foreground against the previously laid groundwork. In the process, the floorboards of his studio start to leave certain impressions as the paint starts to dry. 3 The process of working on the floor is both an attitude and an allowance of the floor to help construct an image. This duality can be examined closely by the somewhat checkered backgrounds that proliferate some of the canvas works, providing clues to the architectural and man-made surfaces that they allude to- but the mixture of planes and against the organic flows of paint drips, one begins to casually fluctuate between the various clues and gaps present as a final image. Shaheen Merali .
Shaheen Merali is a curator and writer based in Berlin and London. Between 2003-08 he was Head of Department for Exhibitions,Film and New Media at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, where he curated the exhibitions The Black Atlantic, Dreams and Trauma, Moving images and the Promised Lands and Re-Imagining Asia, One Thousand years of Separation. In 2008, he was given the new role of artistic director for the very first contemporary Indian art gallery in Germa ny, BodhiBerlin for which he curated Blindstars, Starsblinds, a monograph exhibition on Shilpa Gupta, and and the seminal Everywhere is War (and rumors of war) for BodhiMumbai, India, Previously in 2006, he was the co-curator of the 2006 6th Gwangju Biennale of Korea. In February 2009, the large-scale historical show, The Untold (the rise of) Schisms, will open at Alcala 31 in Madrid accompanied by a publication that traces the rise of the political right within popular Indian culture and its neigh bouring regions, Merali has edited several volumes, including Far Near Distance, Contemporary Positions for Iranian Artists (2004); Spaces and Shadows, Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia and about Beauty (2005); New York States of Mind and Re- Imagining Asia (Sagi Books 2007)