Wassily Kandinsky believed that every artist is impelled by an inner necessity to express three things: His own personality, the spirit of his age, and – as a “servant of art”– art as such. If one shares this view, every single artwork is faced with a major task. The individual work of art must not only address the most intimate aspects of the artist, but also the spirit of the age and the great questions of art. Indeed, we usually judge artworks not only in terms of their capacity to convey an original artistic style, but at the same time ask: What element of innovation do they add to the world that allows us to see it in a new light? How do they push the boundaries of art?

I can’t help but think of this as I’m standing next to Maximilian Rödel in front of his series Prehistoric Sunsets. Our conversation quickly turns to the big questions. How does something new come about, and how does it affect what already exists? Reflecting on this question is one of the most significant motivations of Rödel’s work. The process of creating Prehistoric Sunsets is also shaped by this. The artist periodically lets the non-figurative images rest before continuing work on them in order to see what happens to them – or rather, to see what happens to him when observing them again. As a result, he works on several canvases in parallel. The paintings come to mutually influence each other in terms of their composition. In this manner they develop from an internal logic, as if they were themselves involved in deciding upon the next stroke of the painter’s hand. You have to break free from wanting something, and instead limit yourself to being something, according to Rödel. The images spring from a desire to communicate his own, inner systems to the outside world, and to at least partially manifest them in a way that makes them visible to others. This is part of what Kandinsky calls “the principle of inner necessity” – the element of personality. Still, Rödel feels that the moments that hold the greatest relevance are those in which he loses control of what happens on the canvas. It is only in these moments that something truly new can arise, Rödel says, something that he does not necessarily understand even himself.

It follows that there is an element of transcendence in the process of creation. This element still lingers on in the moment of observation. In the finished Sunset paintings, the color variations that glow in a spectrum of orange, pink and violet melt into one another in a way that makes the foreground and background almost impossible to tell apart. Just as when watching a real sunset, where the color gradient of the sky changes almost imperceptibly from one moment to the next, Rödel’s application of paint provides a similarly rich variety: There is always another color that inserts itself into one’s perception. The viewer’s gaze ranges over the chromatic surfaces of the Prehistoric Sunsets, and precisely because it is unable to find something to seize hold of, it is free to dig ever deeper into color nuances.

Rödel’s paintings are beautiful, but they are not content with just being beautiful. Their beauty is not delicate and smooth, but immense and rugged. The colors develop an undercurrent that pulls the viewer’s gaze into an indeterminate depth. It is as if the sky was covered with light clouds that suddenly crack open to reveal the vastness of the heavens. The experience of this depth in the image evokes a hint of the sublime, an aesthetic category that has been associated with the feeling of being overpowered ever since it became fully explored in the 18th century. Edmund Burke, who in 1757 wrote what is probably the most well-known study of the sublime, argues that many things we perceive are able to produce a “sort of delightful horror” in us, as long as they do not present an immediate danger. This “delightful horror” refers to phenomena such as raging thunderstorms, the magnificence of the starry heaven, or a building of overwhelming dimensions. However, the sight need not be terrifying in itself. Instead, the sublime occurs whenever a certain bewilderment comes into play. The intangible depth of Rödel’s paintings convey a sense of infinity and of temporal and spatial indeterminacy that may even be jarring to the viewer. We are not just confronted by a canvas covered with paint. We are – if we allow ourselves such confrontation – engaged by something greater.

Burke regarded the experience of the sublime as arising from the properties of the objects themselves. If his line of reasoning were followed, it would be Rödel’s paintings themselves that trigger the experience of the sublime. Immanuel Kant, who toward the end of the 18th century criticized Burke’s treatise as insufficient, held the contrary view: that the sublime is an intellectual feeling that springs from the reflective judgement of the observer. While Burke saw the power of the sublime as independent of our reasoning, and, on the contrary, as something that anticipates it, for Kant it is precisely from our reflection that the feeling of the sublime in relation to an object arises. In his Critique of Judgement, Kant explains that an ocean agitated by storms cannot be called sublime, but that the sight of it can attune the mind to a feeling that is “sublime because the mind has been incited to abandon sensibility, and employ itself upon ideas involving a higher purposiveness”. Kant would not consider the paintings themselves as sublime. However, when they arouse a feeling of being overpowered, and if mastered by intellectual judgement, they become sublime.

It is interesting to note that Kant limited his analysis at the end of the 18th century to the contemplation of nature, because artworks, according to his understanding, could only be an imitation of nature and consequently only have a diminished effect. It wasn’t until about two hundred years after Kant that Jean-François Lyotard, in the 1980s, extended the scope of sublime aesthetics to also include the contemplation of art. This development was made possible above all by a transformation that happened in art itself, as the object of art was no longer the reproduction of nature. The experience of the sublime, as Lyotard succinctly puts it, happens in the moment when one becomes aware of the dismantling of consciousness. Following Lyotard, the sublime emotion is entailed by precisely this awareness. For this process to occur, art must incorporate a non-mimetic moment, which is just what Maximilian Rödel’s works do in their constant approach of the new. Non-figurative art, according to Lyotard, is able to evoke an experience that makes one conscious that the faculty of presentation, the imagination, fails. The avant-garde artwork no longer bends itself to models; it no longer imitates nature, but attempts to “present the fact that there is an unpresentable”. With the advent of the aesthetics of the sublime, the stake of art in the 19th and 20th centuries was to be witness to the fact that there is an indeterminacy. As Lyotard outlined the task of non-figurative art in this way, it is as if he were invoking Kandinsky’s second condition regarding the artist’s obligation to express the spirit of the age. This condition remains relevant in the 21st century. Rödel’s paintings are capable of doing just that: They witness an indeterminacy. In a title such as Prehistoric Sunsets, there is an allusion to the universal in them: The term “prehistoric” contains the paradigm of the primeval or the primordial, that which stands outside of all recorded history and thereby beyond every attempt at assigning a time to them. Through this, they address Kandinsky’s third and last element regarding the expression of “art as such.”

What Maximilian Rödel’s paintings can make us aware of, is, above all, how a process of careful, concentrated, yet non-intentional application of paint on canvas can create something that is so much more than the physical, material object. In the process of their own creation, the images liberate themselves from their immediate context. This event is essentially unknowable. The sublime is the manner in which Being may be sensed in its unknowability. Rödel’s body of work shows us that there are things that withdraw from purposive logic and intention. We need not understand everything.

Stefanie Gerke