When artists decide to make monochrome paintings today, they do not do so without knowledge of their history. However, for Maximilian Rödel, born in 1984, it is not a matter of continuing a tradition that begins with Claude Monet and reaches from Kazimir Malevich to Mark Rothko, Yves Klein and Imi Knoebel. Rödel’s darkly hued visual language, with colour gradients that give the canvas a gentle and cloudy pulse, are like open thoughts: There are memories, hints and echoes of places that cannot be not clearly determined, but their DNA is mediated atmospherically by the picture. Thus Rödel doesn’t abide by monochromy as a sphere of negotiating the autonomy of art, but opens up possibilities of associative perception. Clues to this are given by single intimations of corners and edges, curvatures and horizon lines, scratches and smudges, which point towards the figurative – however, none of this functions as a clear reference or a concrete symbolism, which the viewer must decode in order to end up at private mythologies or socially relevant narrations. Unlike Luc Tuyman’s paintings, which rely on reduced pictorial means in a similarly muted way, Rödel’s work does not revolve around allegories of the abyss of human nature based on historical or cultural events. His paintings evoke an existentialist fundamental attitude, borne by a vague tendency towards the mysterious and the uncertainty of being. The viewer’s eye gets lost in the colour gradients, cannot find hold in its search for a position, cannot find recourse in the space that hesitantly develops on the canvas, it reaches out for a perceptual anchor among the depicted shapes to no avail, instead of plunging into metaphysical or narrative realities – the contours on the picture surface are too vague to produce a lucid feeling of transcendence or narration. Effectively it seems as if the monk in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting had been removed, his spirit pushed into a different corner, where he continues his existence as a mere memory. What remains is the significance of a mood, not the mood itself. Rödel consciously eschews any type of staging that provides total immersion or storytelling in painting. Instead, the bright accents on the reddish-violet hues, sometimes drifting into a greyish black, only emphasize the emptiness more strongly: The monochrome surface does not linger in self-referential chromaticism, but becomes a space on the threshold of the apocalypse. With this Rödel’s painting has less in common with colour-field painting or a post-modern type of figurativity, and more with Romanticism and its heirs, ranging to Informel.

Umberto Eco referred to this movement in his 1962 essay volume The Open Work: In it he takes the ambiguity of the image as a starting point, to which no clear statement is allocated, but only a vague conception, a tendency, transported by the structure of the picture, which in turn he understands as a “system of relations.” The viewer also interprets this system openly, or rather contextually, depending on which culture, society or experience his background consists of. Despite the dark underlying tone of Rödel’s paintings, they can be read as open and interactive in Eco’s sense of the words. They do not subscribe to certain spiritual or surreal mindscapes, but stay in motion. Romanticism becomes an ontological atmospheric expanse.

Gesine Borcherdt

For the French philosopher Simone Weil, attention is prayer. Part of what prayer achieves, for Weil, is to reveal the absence of the object at the same time as it conveys its presence. Such thinking feels pertinent to the luminous, weightless zones of color in works by Maximilian Rödel and Julien Saudubray. Their intense, diaphanous grounds harness the complexity of what it is to look at a painting, which can be to feel moved and acted upon by it, to enter a proposed state of being. Weil imagines attention as a suspension of thought: it waits, not seeking anything. Through Rödel and Saudubray’s paintings, it is possible to experience this condition, and to see the epiphanies which might come out of its attainment.

Flooded with light, the eye is drawn to small shifts in tone, the inexhaustible richness of the painted surface. In Rödel’s radiant veils, close observation uncovers all manner of movement beneath a mesmerising stillness. Mauve descends and dissolves into pink, which yields to a creeping violet. Blue is tinted by a lime green delicate as cirrus. Color becomes palpable, more tactile than anything that might be grasped by seeing alone. These paintings absorb; in them the viewer is submerged. Saudubray’s address is no less captivating. Stood before these paintings, the interplay between colors emerges as complex, fluid: does blue enclose the orange, which cascades down the canvas in a spectacle of gravity and turpentine’s effects on paint, or does that column of orange bisect the blue? Where colors meet, their edges, the overlaps within which one tone suffuses another, for Saudubray elicits tension, a frisson that strikes the viewer with the force of static.

Weil’s ideas around thinking and time flash through Saudubray’s sequence titled ‘Watching’. Art might more commonly be associated with looking, a way of seeing which occupies a specific duration, often brief, and has a distinct object, as for the viewer who encounters a painting in a gallery space. Watching suggests observation that is durational or open-ended. It is attentive, in Weil’s sense of the word. In a pair of paintings in ‘Watching’, blue shapes stacked at the centre of the composition chime with their title in their resemblance to the structure of the human eye. But Saudubray is less interested in a literal description of the body and more in the phenomenology of sustained looking. When confronted with an object, arrested in place by some desire to apprehend or understand it, what happens to perception? With time it might deepen, penetrating beneath the illusions of the visible world to access something timeless and eternal. Plato understood this as the realm of ideas. Yet anyone who has attempted such feats will know how liable the mind is to intrude upon perception, to disturb and waylay it, often to playful effect. Other images slide into view. And so an abstract canvas shifts in the manner of a Rorschach blot, with the squashed circular forms of ‘Watching’ transforming from eyes into flames, seeds, fish, petals.

This form of encounter equally shapes Rödel’s work. To use Saudubray’s charged verb, Rödel’s paintings warrant watching rather than mere looking. Moods float to the surface and fade before they risk the banality of being named. You might find yourself coaxing out images, seeking a concrete correlative: dawn skies, sunsets, subterranean depths, primordial ooze, oceanic ripple, lunar landscape. These paintings have the feel of phosphenes, the visual drama the retina produces at rest, its electrical charges still firing even when the eyes are closed.

For Weil, attention was a discipline for forfeiting personality. Only then, with the self and all its limiting preferences and experiences pushed to the background, could larger truths be discussed. Rödel and Saudubray’s practice appears to share this aim. These paintings strive for an erasure of subjectivity. This is achieved partly through an elimination of figurative language, everything which might block the painter from the idea and the idea from the observer, to paraphrase Mark Rothko. The removal of all symbols or details which might anchor a painting to a particular time, place, or person allow them to transcend their present moment and explore fundamental questions about reality, perception, and emotion. Color sits at the heart of these artists’ work, who both eschew traditional symbolism. Saudubray’s yellows, blues, pinks, and oranges contain within them traces of photosynthesis, pollination, germination, and decomposition. For Rödel too, colors are essences, not allegory. Yet his belong to a more obviously numinous realm. His iridescent palette bypasses our given world, and ascends straight to the heavens.  

These are paintings of metaphysical inquiry premised upon the viewer’s participation. “Growing”, another sequence of Saudubray’s, exemplifies this reckoning with universal themes. Growth is a state shared by all earth’s organisms big and small, but also describes the layering by which Saudubray realizes a painting. The vast network of biological process which unites the human with the non-human, the macro and the micro, are brought to bear on one another. The result is an affirmation of light, time, sensation, and space as the essence of vitality in all things, the thread — like the lines that score Saudubray’s canvases — connecting people to the environments that sustain them. Rödel handles essential questions through related means. His paintings inspire a meditative state that prompts questions about consciousness itself. What can be rationally comprehended by the institutions of philosophy and science, and what evades their discourses? Perhaps painting exists not so much to capture the more elusive aspects of reality, but to tune in to its frequencies. In Rödel’s work, paintings that resemble portals engulf the viewer, and invite reflection on the deepest recesses and outer reaches of experience. These are gateways into memory and desire; the sublime, the mystical. In this way both Saudubray and Rödel could be said to explore the spiritual, though their work is at once more grounded and intimate than that, less monumental or remote. On the other side of attention, Weil sought out grace. There is no easy way into this state of enchantment, but Saudubray and Rödel provide some possible blueprints.

Essay by Rebecca Birrell, Leverhulme Trust Fellow at The University of St Andrews and Research Associate at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK. Birrell is author of This Dark Country; Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century.

Maximilian Rödel’s work seems to reveal a genuine, primordial event: the unfathomable event before events. Through its complex simplicity, many avenues of perception are unveiled. One can hear distant echoes of the final (and incomplete) philosophical work by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs. And here in these paintings, clarity becomes complicated, tranquility becomes tangled: „No thing, no side of a thing shows itself except by actively hiding others, denouncing them in the act of concealing [masquer] them. To see is a matter of principle to see farther than one sees to reach a latent existence. The visible is the outline and depth of the visible. The visible does not admit of pure positivity any more than the visible does.“[1] Through the painterly act, the works of Maximilian Rödel depict a revelation; they tell a story by magnetizing the invisible within the perceptible, showing aspects of the veiled complexity of being. This manifested interweaving is not the showing off of color, nor an emptiness to be filled: it is the pulsations of the invisible pushing to be seen, affirming their latent state by hints of their presence. We seem to find ourselves in front of Merleau-Ponty’s beloved “flesh of the world,” in which he pinpoints the interweaving of the visible hiding the invisible. What could be better than flesh, with all its muscle and complicated traits, to best express this relationship? These paintings seem to be a coagulation of the invisible: etymologically the word carne, flesh, has its origins in the proto-Indo-European kréwh, raw meat, which in fact means congealed blood – and apart from any ideological references, the paintings express the unsaid, their language is a whisper. Perhaps they are closer to something less material, less coagulated: are they perhaps reminiscent of blood that boils, recording the essence of being? Perhaps in their unmistakable lightness of being, they expose the dialectic between the invisible and the visible. Is it not perhaps true that when looking at them, the material becomes airy?
[1]from: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. R.C. McCleary, Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 20/21.  Original: Signes, Paris, Gallimard, 1960.

Domenico de Chirico

I see myself on the giant terrace of my house on the Amalfi Coast, walking back and forth, smelling strongly of perfume and enjoying the magnificent view. Cypress trees right and left. It’s an evening in August, and soon the sun will sink into the sea. I’m not wearing any clothes. Though I’m very shy, no one can see onto my terrace in any case. When the scent of my perfume is barely there, I walk over to my perfume dispenser and pour a bit more over my head. Then I begin pacing up and down my terrace again. Suddenly I notice that this perfume smells like peaches. I’m really happy about this discovery. I begin singing a song from Herman van Veen. I go inside, as I’m afraid of the insects that arrive in the early evening. The rooms of my house are almost empty. Only a collapsable desk is there, with small souvenirs arranged on top, trophies of my greatest sporting achievements: sailing, mountain climbing, skiing… and otherwise, just two books. One is the autobiography of Herman van Veen. The other is a white book, my own White Book, also an autobiography. I’ve just finished reading it again in a single night. It’s my personal copy, the one I take with me on world tours. I sit down at the desk on a collapsable stool and scribble a note: “Call Daniel Craig!” I want to win him over for the filming of my bestseller. He looks a little older than me, but we can fix that digitally in the post-production. And he’s gained some weight recently. He loves cookies. He eats cookies all day. Lots and lots of butter cookies.

A luminous, resonant hymn moves through the space. The chromatic shifts of Rödel’s immense and impalpable paintings open an extraordinary window into unbounded space, transcending physicality with resonances poetic and mythic. Subsuming, pulsing color plays out like live theatre; the players, standing like sentries, enveloping viewers into their world. Amongst an assembly of towering works, two paintings measuring a mere 50 x 40 cm even act as enigmatic portals.

Held in a hypnotic state of tension, the paintings hover in a seductive state of intrinsic dichotomies: intimate and sublime, power and vulnerability, before and after. Titles such as Prehistoric Sunset suggest a time unexperienced, while other paintings murmur of a serene utopia, a kind of imagined aftermath. Of these fundamental polarities, there is also the spiritual versus personal engagement, mirroring a spectrum of innate human experience. In this turbulent contemporary moment, we seek the universal, connectivity, a shared way to understand. Beauty aside, these paintings have the ability to stir within oneself all that is human. These works are undoubtedly, formally, as much about feeling as they are about painting, and through their eternal tussle, the artist offers a reflection of our condition.

Fields of floating color, this new suite of works is a treatise on immateriality and an affirmation on the power of color. In the painting Prehistoric Sunset M I (2022), glowing violet radiates through a black veil, giving fullness to void as an unsuppressed luminosity breaks through. It is Rödel’s handling of color that unbinds and opens the picture plane. Spellbinding passages of color are without beginning or end. Ambiguous transitions of tonalities – a cloud of rose that develops to plum gray or wisps of pale yellow that coalesce with faint green – dissolve the paintings’ surfaces. Rödel’s vaporous clouds are at times defined by visible brushstrokes, subtly reminding us of the artist’s hand, and momentarily, anchoring the work back in the physical world.

A highlight of the exhibition is Helen Frankenthaler’s masterpiece “Off White Square” (1973) — one of the largest paintings Frankenthaler ever made, and its exhibition debut in Asia. This monumental painting exemplifies the highly expressive body of work that Frankenthaler produced during her transition from gestural abstraction to color field painting, featuring the expanses of pure color and her signature use of diluted paint.

The exhibition “The Inner Light or the Expression of Color” places six artists of different generations and origins in a dialogue that on the one hand celebrates the radiance of color, and on the other hand aims to point out how immanent the glow and light still are for contemporary art. While light in painting can rather be characterized as a bright-dark contrast, luminescence describes an atmosphere evoked by color accents. To link these two related but nevertheless different aspects, the exhibition title suggests the term “inner light”. The title also aims to recall Mark Rothko, who used this term to describe the effect of his abstract paintings.

But whereas for Rothko the distinction between abstraction and figuration was still ideologically motivated, the exhibited works indicate that this separation seems to make little sense today. Art is about finding form. Artists find form through composition. Composition arises through formal structure or through contrasts. Contrasts are created through color.

Philipp Bollmann

Spirit took a photo on May 19, 2005, a photo of a sunset. The probe had launched from Earth some two years earlier to land on Mars half a year later. The sun here is peculiarly white and surrounded by a bluish haze that fades into a rusty brown sky. You could almost mistake it for a sunset on Earth until you notice that the colors are inverted. The horizon cutting into the white sun is low, with a jagged ridge of hills rising up on the left half of the image. The ground is brown-red, because the sand is infused with iron-rich minerals. It looks cold, and at night on Mars, the temperature can drop to minus 85°C. Spirit is a vehicle with six wheels that turn in all directions, under which the oxidized sand is a crackling cushion. The car runs on solar power. But it is just that: a car. No one hears the crackling. The photo was taken before the first human was even up here, a seeing without seeing. Spirit’s successor, InSight, sent the first sound recordings from Mars in 2018. It’s a dull rumble that sounds like the sinking feeling of intangible loneliness blurring the line between self and environment.

Spirit and InSight are not the first artifacts on the Red Planet – more will follow. The timeline points toward the future: utopia, it lies ahead. An architectural firm has already made blueprints of what buildings on the planet 54.6 million kilometers away might look like. They will be 3D printed and assembled by robots. And if the climate makes life on Earth impossible, then an outpost for humanity can be built here at some point. The search for life on Mars has fallen to the wayside, although primitive microbes have been found in the planet’s ice. What’s more important now: How can life be possible here in the future?

We can perhaps differentiate between two types of utopias, one in the near and very near future, the other in the past. Both help us make sense of the present, both in completely different ways. One of those who is best at pulling something like evidence or circumstantial evidence from the mists of the past that our best days are behind us is Erich von Däniken. His pet project, prehistoric astronautics, is spectacular. He wants nothing less than to turn our entire understanding of history upside down. The utopias are behind us; we are perhaps descendants of extraterrestrials. Do we have a utopian past? For the development of intelligence, is there an eternal return?

Therein resides a great beauty and a bit of melancholy. In 1944, young Erich experienced something when he saw eight men. Like beings from another world, he thought, of the American soldiers stepping out of a bomber that was forced to make an emergency landing in Aargau, walking without a word past the child. Later, the Swiss hotelier, who wanted to be a scientist but wrote bestsellers instead, saw the traces of aliens that had brought civilization to a primitive humanity with their temples and pyramids. Melted rock, landing strips for UFOs, astronaut suits in cave paintings: it was all evidence of pre-astronautics. There are 232 question marks in his first book, he says. He dreams himself into worlds of fuzzy references until he finds the “world formula” somewhere. But if he didn’t have an explanation for everything, his narratives would be more convincing, and if his perspective didn’t remind us so much of the civilizing mission that imperialism once used to justify itself, von Däniken’s visions of the past wouldn’t be so simple-minded. What we need for the future, perhaps, are fictions that do not search for closed systems in the fog, but only further fog.

The answer may well lie in the gentle color gradations of the Martian sunset, rather than in the contradiction-free confluence of myth and technology. Perhaps they prepare us for inconceivable loneliness, the point at which the boundary between subject and object is punctured. We don’t have words for it yet, but Sigmund Freud once alluded to the oceanic. Limitless and unbounded, he called it: the invention of eternity. This is not a metaphor. The first thing is that we will see differently.

Philipp Hindahl