When looking at paintings, painted canvases, I ask myself whether I am seeing images. At best, events, realities, camouflages, representations, performances, sentimentalities, and conditions— or visual facts: observations or interrogations of becoming visible? Or none of the above—and instead merely reflections of my own self?
If defining an “image” as a product is so inscrutable, how complex must the production of a thing that we would like to refer to as an “image” then be for artists, for painters, in the first place? Especially when “professional painting” is concerned, something that wants to inscribe a painterly handling and/or the results of the act of painting in the cultural system of art. Both of them, the production and the reception, the designing and the recognizing, seem futile. But full of possibilities!
These, the eventualities, are first able to unfold when the painter as well as I myself also ignore the essential blurriness of the terms to be described and/or categorized, the insufficiency of the deterministic specialized language and lingo of awareness—at least for a moment. The handed-down terminology, in part carried over to the present, and the purported knowledge are pushed to the side, in order to bring “painting” to the world or else to encounter it in a way that perceives a particular approach to painting—namely, color-painting, with its unexpected presence—as an autonomous and yet normative force, as a value.
In spite of all the academic or avant-garde theorems that have been deployed, discussed, in part institutionalized in an absolutist manner over the past centuries, painting (in itself and in general) is independent of the zeitgeist, discourse, society, and history of development. Every painted thing is first of all an apodictic assertion— regardless of by whom, at what point in time, and in which context it was painted:
I am because I am and that’s how it is.
Anyone—whether artists, theorists, or audience; occasionally also painters of houses and walls—who produces painting, sees painting, describes painting, wants to, can, must realize or receive painting as a medium of the arts, must occupy themselves with this essentialist, perhaps even existentialist starting point.
Everything else, hence, any derivation of a painterly manifestation of personal biographies or necessities, be they stylistic, evolutionary, sociopolitical, or historical necessities, would be categorical subjectivity and a-historical hubris: namely, relatively successful fake news of the history of art and taste, but nevertheless an issue of a banalized and aestheticizing belief, rather than an account of the real.
Painting (in itself and in general) is directionless and, in the best sense, purposeless, but rarely meaningless—and with its abruptness always sensual. Whatever interested circles think, claim, or believe: every painted thing that becomes a picture is a relinquishing, a gesture emancipated from the I, pure presence, free of intention, liberated from knowledge, and generally lacking formation—neither impression nor expression, solely appearance, or better still: a composition with form.
This was already apparent around 1900.
If I now wanted to acknowledge that painting (in itself and in general) is fundamentally nonreferential, can be neither mimetic nor abstracting, and is not self-referential in any way, I would implicitly endorse the notion that, consequently, every object painted in color would be an a-historical, an-aesthetic, and a-pictorial object—and would at the very beginning blank out the (rarely supra-temporal, generally customary) ideas and expectations of both the painting and the seeing subject. The singular pictorial narrative would stand for itself; not only the production of images, but also any interpretation, any reflectiveness, would be in vain, even superfluous.
The painted image as a fait divers is, however, indefensible. That would be comparable—like all fabrications of coincidence or artificial intelligence—to a denial of the human power of the imagination, and, on top of everything, of our historical and aesthetic memory or insights—meaningless and lacking in content, a serious disappointment of cultural hopes.
Thus, from the beginning: Why do I want to pursue Doris Piwonka’s assertion that her painted things are “images,” and therefore convey meaning, are meaningful? Why do the modulations reproduced in this book, realized with and in color, provoke (my) intellectual sensibility as well as (my) emotional understanding? As in general, the answers are found in the questions, since what could be more seductive than a speculative reconstruction of intentionality and/or an intellectually stimulating construction of truth—ultimately, a collaborative transformation of an originally solitary act of painting into a common property, a cultural asset?
Precious little.
My eyes see: canvas and stretcher bars, covered in part or entirely with color, tempera, oil, pigment, gesso; brushstrokes, traces of adhesive, the paths of sponges, washes, rubbing, blotches, overpainting, transparency, layering, bleeding-through, wetness, degrees of drying, refracted textures. From top to bottom, right to left, center to the edges, I decipher successions of composing and destroying, a few moments of supplementing, but, above all, a removing or omitting, an ostensible non-finito. I recognize traces of fortuities, a reactive inclusion of occurrences and facts from outside the image in what takes place within the image. I sense pulsating light and occasionally, with a wink of the eye, move down smoky corridors. I could cite and recount many more of my eyes’ impressions—optical experiences, as a result of which my mind, which we will here call my inner eye, closes: a harmony of plan and maze.
Doris Piwonka not only allows such sightings and interpretations; she asks of me, of every viewer, that we acknowledge the uncertainty of looking, the physically and psychologically conditioned ambivalences of what can be seen. Are we, quite frankly, able to differentiate between intentionally generated, structurally composed materiality and an arbitrary or redundant finding of form? Well, in the individual work as if incidentally—in the sequence of painting, by contrast, intentionally—the artist points to the absurdity of this in a dualistic image of reality, a dividing of rational logic and intuition rooted in a binary perception of the world, an evaluative separation of concept and improvisation.
She is actually showing: she realized an interplay of the most diverse methods for generating images. This also occurs owing to her knowledge of more recent art history, of painterly, even a-painterly, positions since Kazimir Malevich, Marcel Duchamp, the Concrete artists—or of the postwar abstractions up to “radical painting,” the canon of “non-objective art.” But Piwonka does not marginalize or even negate the technical achievements and theoretical insights, rooted in the bipolar, of the so very destructive twentieth century, but instead confidently develops them further, overwritten with comprehensive equanimity, and simultaneously by means of her own methods, as informal and informative research, without any conceptually formulated objective. Away from more or less dogmatic systems of the imaginary or design models that become depleted at brief intervals, and toward intelligent freedom—autarchy in the sense of a self-determined and long-term organization of artistic action, a narrative, generated in a surprising manner, of becoming an image suspended in paint.
In 2020, the curator David Komary described Piwonka’s painterly, time-embedded, performative approach as follows: “Her works are based on a consciously nonlinear form of the painting process. The artist does not always work on multiple paintings at a time; a painting can also be developed at a later date, sometimes years later, or sections are rubbed out and reworked. Here painting assumes the form of an aesthetic operational field in order to call into question the ‘being and becoming’ of forms relative to their support medium, to their essential constitutive elements (color, canvas, stretcher bars), but also in relation to the influence of the surrounding space.”
In the exercise, the aesthetic field of activity of “painting” is hardly misused as a vehicle for her own will to express, motivated by a personal moment; the painterly possibilities for action instead themselves form the basis for the finding of form. In a certain way, Piwonka becomes an instrument. A tool that perceives itself and its possibilities and reflects in a multilogue conducted over a longer period of time: Piwonka mirrors doing in making—she reacts to the appeals of the material, of the stuff that, in an ontological sense, constructs a picture. She is, however, barely interested in material
appropriateness, in art-historical parlance, or in logically, rationally constituted consequences, which would lead to easily readable but lifeless creations.
What occupies Piwonka is the ongoing, multidimensional process of deciding. In the working process, she trusts in “participatory decision- making,” in an exchange between her experience of seeing (which incidentally includes ours) and in what the material itself as a form of potentiality in the space for action, the quad, offers. Her “aesthetic field of action” is essentially a spatial structure in which endless communication and interaction between thing and awareness is facilitated. The results of this multidirectional interaction are autopoietic entities—to which we assign the term “image.” In a clear-sighted manner, Komary thus supplements the protagonists mentioned, artist and material, with other key actors, operational fellow players—us: “. . . the viewer observes himself looking here and observing what is transformed at what point in time from a peripheral event into an aesthetic event—and vice versa. . . . Her [Piwonka’s] work alerts the viewer to the creative power of one’s own looking, bringing seeing alive in its phenomenological dimension as both a sensing and constitutive instrument.”
This would bring us, unless we want to drift into neurobiological fields, to Marcel Duchamp’s dictum directed against any explicitnessestablished by the retina or individual artistic authenticity, to the fact that, without exception, it is the viewers, the interpreters, who are the ones completing a picture, an artwork. This holds true if we adhere to the widespread notion that the purpose of all “images” is to be, as contemplated from the outside, touched, and used, like trivial artifacts or goods. But perhaps they want the imagination to exist without restrictions—like boulders, flowers, animals, and human beings? And in their so-being, to be appreciated by the artist and viewers as a counterpart, as a world of their own?
The philosopher Markus Gabriel, one of the founders of a “New Realism,” recounts an anecdote, not so much because he would like to define art, but rather because he is pointing to a diverging perception of reality:
“She [the author Gabriel’s three-year-old daughter] recently explained to me that the furry friends from her favorite series created everything that exists by painting the sky blue. When I asked her whether her furry friends also created themselves, she immediately replied ‘yes’ and also expressed this gesturally as if the dogs from the cartoon had also painted themselves. Where does the paint they use to do so come from? Well, as I learned, they also paint it themselves. It is through painting that paint, which is a painting as a whole, comes into existence. . . . Life, too, is thus paint and reality also painting, an interesting thought . . .”
Piwonka’s works perhaps arise from a similar intermediate realm, described by a child on behalf of all fantasists. In this publication, we encounter migrant-like painted beings that have moved into our perception. Not creations by the hand of a genius realizing a subjective intention, calculating the effects, not products of a dictatorial imagination, which might be comprehended and grasped as a result of its signature, its style, its expression—but simply its plainness, its boredom. They, Piwonka’s painted ciphers, apparently do not want to be understood as a whole and definitely not used as part of a culturally defined preserve demarcated as art. They merely want their distinctive features, their self-generating identity, to be seen, to be recognized. This is not metaphysics, but instead a visualized calculus of probabilities.
Piwonka makes use of parameters, or more precisely: like an attentive director, she makes it possible for protagonists to participate in the narrative of a particular picture. And while a network of pictorial attributes and atmospheric or retinal events might be taken into account during the painting process, this does not necessarily have to be executed with and on the canvas. In combination with associatively or spontaneously made decisions regarding actions, for the artist and the work material, the variables open up painterly spaces of possibility that resemble each other but are never homogeneous in form. Since the technical and temporal parameters of this painting space can scarcely be derived from art history, and even less from hierarchical systems associated with the natural sciences or visual aesthetics, in essence, then any phenomenon that generates optically perceptible traces might become part of the objects visible to us, which, very likely, are referred to as “images”—even if they in no way strive to be a representation, but rather want to be embodiments, spectacles. They are spectacles, and at times are not— depending on what we as sighted individuals (for we are not merely extras) allow—
attentively following the act of painting, which is thinking and manual meditation.
So, I follow Piwonka’s visual propositions, at times contemplatively, at times with nervous intensity, barely conditioned: into a blackish-violet,
lemony-pale-turquois waiting room (p. 13), into gardens asphalted in beige (p. 19), into a greenish-yellow, brownish-red submerged architecture of the heavens (p. 27), and out into a grayish-green, redly shimmering, endlessly mirrored surface (p. 32), to darkly concentrated zones of floating above azure, cherry red, orange, and sulfur (p. 41), down into an earthy, dirty-umbra, light-filled chute, on whose edge three blue signs are waiting to leap (p. 48), to a blood-flecked monument to white breath (p. 53), to a silent discussion between clouds, threatened by blurred movements and their shadows (p. 58), to the torn-open, churning veil of Maya (p. 63), with the corporally dreamed itinerary pointing in manifold color directions (p. 67), through a steel-blue icy door to lost signet rings (p. 68), which I maneuver over crimson as a reflection in greenish twilight (p. 75). At a quickly cleaned crime scene marked in red, I take a break (p. 82), before losing my inner and outer balance like a “Johnny-look-in-the-air” when confronted with a damp book landscape (p. 87). I regain my balance amidst sun-kissed wisps of fog (p. 91), past a labyrinth of imagined stairs that blink solely in bright light (p. 95), and out of an ultramarine storm and into rusty warmth (p. 99), fly over nighttime waters, on which the nets of fishers of color billow (p. 107). From below, I climb an olive ladder (p. 109) to reach reservoirs of algae (p. 112); behind them, muses spread out their densely yellowed, no, blue-drenched fabric (pp. 121,
122). I traverse a zone of hallucinatory friendships (p. 126) to sense the onset of meanderings behind me (p. 128). Creeping, I arrive, past petrified gestures, at a padded marge, consoled by a blue heart (p. 133) —directly next to a trembling green, which refuses to blush (p. 138). Or which blushes after all, when my gaze explodes (p. 140), dancing as a spinning, blue-stained figure between worlds of color (p. 147).
In 2020, shortly before her death, the artist Etel Adnan jotted down a few thoughts about silence; notes that accompanied me when writing this text—and became a reflection of Doris Piwonka’s color spaces: “Almost all of my beliefs have deserted me. I take it as a kind of liberation, and anyway, they were never too many. . . . Let’s just be, and for many hours in a row, merge with this vegetal and metallic kind of consciousness, which is so overpowering. . .. We’re on a planet sustained by nothing, carried through pure space by a willful star made of fire and in constant ebullition. We’re travelers covering
traveling grounds. Going, always going.”
I am now sitting in front of my computer screen next to a large window and gazing at a landscape in the winter sunshine. I see nothing—apart from, thankfully, one of Piwonka’s painted realities.
Literature
– Scotti, Roland. Kunstkritik in Frankreich zwischen 1886 und 1905: Zwischen Sichtbarkeit und literarischer Spekulation, Texte zur Zukunft einer Kunst.
Mannheim, 1994, pp. 39ff. and 62–65.
– Komary, David. “Self Similarity: Josef Achrer, Doris Piwonka.” In Position. Edited by David Komary. Galerie Stadtpark, Krems. Vienna, 2020, pp. 139–46,
esp. pp. 142–45.
– Gabriel, Markus. Liebe Kinder oder Zukunft als Quelle der Verantwortung: Briefe an die kommenden Generationen, vol. 2. Munich, 2023, pp. 28–29.
– Adnan, Etel. Shifting the Silence. Brooklyn, 2020, pp. 23, 25, and 33.
from: Doris Piwonka, wahrscheinlich/probable, Ritter Verlag, Klagenfurt, 2024