Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain is pleased to present “Tout en même temps”, Matthias Reinmuth’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery.
Tout en même temps. All the world's debris seems to be accumulating at this particularly troubled moment in history: the environmental emergency with its consequent global warming, the wars of conquest at the gates of the West and the uncontrollable migrations caused by hunger and conflict. In this sense, we cannot ignore the extent to which civilized values, which seemed established, are increasingly being questioned by politics. Moreover, we cannot overlook the threat of Artificial Intelligence which, left uncontrolled, will make the range of individual choices increasingly serial (and manipulable).
But what about Art? Although the increasingly damaging influence of finance, advertising sensationalism and the global media is weighing on the quality of market institutions choices, Art resists as the remaining “place” available for authentic experimentation and the exaltation of those qualities that man retains despite everything: the desire for freedom, the poetry of the imagination, the intuition to find new solutions even when it seems impossible to glimpse a way out of all the problems that afflict our daily lives.
Art can imply and re-articulate everything at the same time, in the same perceptive instant.
A “whole” even more universal than the historical “whole”.
Art, in this case painting, retains a phenomenal anthropological primacy: it can speak of man without describing him, it can research man without getting bogged down in arid descriptions of his actuality. It magnifies the senses, which are capable of blending forms/light/color, stimulating our thinking through a strange alchemy of sensations that become feelings and ultimately, in turn, release images of latent memories in the viewer and, in the process, create new associations of images, transforming the past into the future. A regenerative dynamic that transforms the image we see and know into a vision of something new. This is why Art is a miracle, because it leads us, as observers, to leave the dimension of reality for a moment and enter another where we can finally breathe in the freedom to be ourselves, without the chains of reality's constraints, and in this precious moment, transform everything anew, change the coordinates and make us believe, once again, in the hope of a better future.
Art, with its various instruments, such as painting, can help man to rediscover the primacy he holds: creating matter from thought. And in Matthias Reinmuth's non-objective painting, we find poetry and evocation, as it goes beyond describing the forms of reality, activating deep resources by recalling feelings and desires...
The “pictorial family” of Reinmuth's post-aniconic abstractionism undoubtedly has an aesthetic foundation in the “non-objective”painting that emerged in Germany with the exhibition organized by Klaus Honnef at Münster's Westfälischer Kunstverein in 1974, even if artists like Reinmuth borrowed from this rigidly rational (and anti-sentimental) world the principles of “fluid color”, the cancellation of the image and the value of technical research (as a means, not an end!) in short, not the founding intentions, but rather the romantic matrix that inevitably links them to color. Phillip Otto Runge and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1's Romantic experiments on the color spectrum in 1810 became the starting point for asserting that reality is not at the service of science, but that technique is a tool to confirm the incredible heterogeneity of the kind of things in theCosmos, where objects and sensations mix in the same chromatic crucible. More than a century before quantum physics, they had already perceived how the matter of objects could be assimilated to the matter of thoughts, and how color was at the heart of the relationship between the Individual and the Whole. This is where the urgency of the Romantics becomes clear: to overcome the conflict between the exterior (space) and the interior (spirit), and thus to find Novalis2' “Blaue Blume” (Blue Flower), that “thing” which triggers in the human being a profound reaction of awareness of the presence of two coexisting worlds: the things we see and the things we feel. And color is that thing which amalgamates these parallel universes; “Coloris poetry” says Max Dauthendey, the post-romantic poet, and he adds that color, as a physical phenomenon, reveals to us “new suns and new worlds”3.
Romanticism promotes poetry not just in a festive tone, but as a tool for exploring the Infinite; a “powerful instrument” that uses the energy of emotion to create other places, overcoming the infinite distances between the real and the plausible, between reality and dream. And for the Romantics, the dream appears as another existential possibility. In 1810, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim described Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting “The Monk by the Sea” (1808-1810)4 not simply as a realistic landscape, but as an existential experience with a dreamlike basis. Indeed, it is for them a painting capable of going beyond the normal terms of image narration, transforming the scene into pure chromatic sublimation. From this point on, sublimation is the constitutive action of painting, and color is its fundamental viaticum. The sublime is the condition for the perception of beauty, a moment of perceptive suffering and sentimental disquiet when man confronts his limits. Just a few years earlier,Immanuel Kant, following Edmund Burke5, asserted that the sublime was the terrible but positive sensation of the human being in the act of becoming aware of that elusive limit that suggests confrontation with Nature. An infinitely measurable limit precisely, and it is in this “suffering” that Schopenhauer then constructs the concept of beauty, exactly as a friction between momentary pleasure and the (disturbing, painful) perception of surprise and expectation, the condition for the creation of the idea and therefore of thought and fantasy. In aniconic-tonal painting, when speaking of color as a fundamental element, it is inevitable to recognize the world of research that forms later movements straddling the avant-garde (Pointillist Post-Impressionism, the Secession, Color Field and minimalist “clean” painting). In the space of barely a century, this research would revolutionize the history of painting, overtaking figuration with a new emotional narrative based on individual perception (transformative, interpretative)as an alternative to the syntax of forms (structural). In this way, what theRomantics had hoped for, at least in the hermeneutics of art, was realized : the primacy of poetry over prose.
Reinmuth crosses the world of color by implementing a veritable deconstructive sublimation of pictorial structure; through fluid dissolution and tonal suggestion, his painting takes on the same poetic character as a contemporary lyrical text.
He paints on the floor of his large studio in Berlin:he moves slowly, accepting waiting as part of the working system. The composition of the works can go through long phases, with interruptions, questioning and reworking, and the finishing treatments further modify the initial chromatic suppositions and are never totally controllable. Through meditative and intellectual work, he builds up the pictorial structure through fluid color superimpositions that, as they dry, change and, thanks to the waxed finishes, further modify the transparencies and intensities of the composition, while increasing the sense of color depth. The Saxon painter sees Time as the regulating element not only of compositional practice, but also of the result itself, since it is precisely the randomness of the effects produced by the passage of time on color that defines composition. Color, expressed through the use of solvents and waxes that dissolve previously poured colors, shows no traces other than aureoles, fraying and sometimes stains(echoing “informal” suggestions); it presents an oily amalgam that seems to change continuously, creating iridescence, like naphtha aureoles on water.
Reinmuth's own technique for mixing colors is undoubtedly also rooted in his long experience in California (a place of artistic experimentation with light and color). Reinmuth builds “color machines” that are expressly intended to be a source of spontaneous and immediate emotion. His colors “fall on you” and then tell you a story. And it's precisely because of the painter's Californian experience that his colors clearly remind us of the (non-pictorial!) suggestions of the 'Light& Space' movement, which emerged precisely in California, in Venice, and which, from the 1970s onwards, inevitably modified the perception of light in the artistic space and the management of color in painting (undoubtedly also through analytical experience). By this I mean that in “synthetic” painting, L&S's disruptive experiment stimulated a different way of creating perceptual disturbances: in Reinmuth's case, instead of distorting the optical perception of real space, as in the spatial installations of Dan Flavin, James Turrel and Robert Irwin, the space of the canvas is distorted and enlarged only by color - in particular its density and movement - in an action that uses colored pigment as if it were light, with its reflections, its unveiling, its illuminations. Finally, it's not out of the question to think that, in developing the color palette, he probably also drew inspiration from the vivid colors he observed on his many trips to Southeast Asia.
Matthias Reinmuth's paintings seem to throb and physically absorb the viewer, who remains involved in all the suggestions, aesthetic and cultural, of the experience the artist has placed within them; these works are, ultimately, “landscapes of the mind” endowed with a strong evocative capacity.
The exhibition “Tout en même temps” presents a painting that fuses aesthetic and lyrical qualities perfectly coordinated intime with the color of the work; a color that, paraphrasing Hofmannsthal6, transforms and recounts the depth of dreams on the surface of a canvas.
Critical text by Alberto Barranco di Valdivieso, critic, curator, contemporary art historian
1 Phillip Otto Runge (1777-1810), Sphere of Colors, Hambourg,1810 ; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Theory of Colours, Berlin, 1810.
2 Friedrich von Hardenberg known as"Novalis" (1772-1801), Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Berlin, 1802.
3 Max Dauthendey (1867-1918), Ultra-violett,Berlin, 1893. He refers to Johann Wilhelm Ritter's theories (1810) on ultraviolet radiation.
4 Clemens Brentano (1778-1842) and Achim von Arnim(1781-1831), Verschiedene Empfindungen vor einer Seelandschaft vonFriedrich, worauf ein Kapuziner, in "Berliner Abendblätter", Berlin, 3 October 1810.
5 Edmund Burke (1729-1797), A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of theSublime and Beautiful, London, 1757. Unlike Kant, Burke's sublime borders onhorror, the terror of the infinite and the mystery that eludes and overwhelms us.
6 Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), Buchder Freunde, Leipzig, 1922.