POETICS OF IMPURE PAINTING. It has been often remarqued, that, from his beginnings, the works of Hinrich Weidemann have been poetics of art, poetics of painting. His works always research the possibilities and impossibilities of painting, that for him is never a pure and always a plural one. ,The task of painting: to leave it with painting'. Since several years he explores with his different workgroups, what has been called ,writing of appearence'. This is for him not to achieve by an écriture automatique, with its strong tendency to stereotypical repetition, but by "fragmentary writing" (M.Blanchot).
GIFT OF GIFT. To-give-to-see-and-to-read the giving-to-see-and-to-read. Not tautologically – as perhaps in Minimal-Art – this initiates movements of self-deviation, sensual and reflexive games of self-differing, wich to follow becomes a celebration of the non-identical. Painting is practicing here ethics of difference and alterity. Seeing different, not only seeing different things.
NATALITY. Despite the word of the ‚end of painting' these works put emphasis on the aspect of natality. The artwork is always a coming one (W. plays with the, untranslateable, german: ,Kunstwerk' is a ‚Kunft-Werk'). The painting becomes an ‚other scene', the image consists in the uplooming trace of its arrival - and vanishing. From there the motif of tracing in many of his works. From there the motifs of temporalisation and spacement‚ of springing and tearing, of drawing and withdrawing, all kept in suspense.
ARTWITHDRAWINGS. Drawing and withdrawing, giving and taking off, appearence and disappearence, inscription and effacement don't stand in a simple dialectical relation. ‚Artwithdrawings' alludes to art's ability to find it's productive potential still in withdrawing, even in withdrawing art from art. Against a culture of spectacle, as against a cyclic returning neotraditionalism, W. insists on the radical heterogenity of painting and drawing. They find their critical possibilities in the subversion of even visibility and readability.
PAINTINGWITHDRAWINGS. The exhibition shows watercolours of an extreme large scale, extracts from a series called „Le partage des peaux". (The title can be read as an allusion to Merleau-Ponty's remarque, painting would deal with ‚metemsomatosis'.) As in other series of W., painting and drawing are no longer strictly separable. A working method that makes differing itself to it's topos, brings this common distinctions in a permanent transition. That's why in his work, as in only few works by artists of his generation, drawings, watercolours, inkpaintings and similary techniques have the same autonomous status as (oil)paintings and tableaux. With a large range of painting tools, colour zones, compositions and in permanent alteration of putting on, taking away and washing off, of tracing and effacing, the medium watercolour borders here to it's limits. Painting process and result are becoming one. In and between the paintings arises a kind of cinematographic drift of panning and cut. The paintings as multitude open themselves, in a dynamics of selfinterruption and connecting, to the serie and to it's outside.
DRAWINGWITHDRAWINGS. The other part of the show is an ensemble of 40 graphite drawings from 1989/92 entitled „In, Visi & Un, Reada" (games of bilities). It is supplemented by an interruption of four glaspaintings. With W.'s work you make at first sight the experience, that it escapes any kind of view that tries to identify it. The drawings, all of very different kinds, fragmentating extremely like aphorisms, are installed in four lines one upon the other. So they produce a dense continuity of the discontinual, seducing the view to an incessant movement. The spectator can see and read the drawn lines under very different focusses as trace, gesture, figure, landscape, pictogramm, ideogramm, networks, compositions and so on, without that one perception mode succeeds in dominating. It is precisely in this aporetical undecidability and multivalence, that the works insist in a becoming, wich uncovers the non-ontological character of visibility.
PASSEPARTOUTWITHDRAWINGS. The four glaspaintings „Passeparien", on the same frames as the drawings and also from1992, play with the regulation-functions of frames and passpartout, that are themselves conventional systems of withdrawing, steering the inside-outside relations of artworks. By painting on and behind the, elsewise overseen, glas, its colouring, volume and luminiscence are being articulated. At the same time a game of semi-opacities is filtering three drawings in parts or completely. In the fourth frame the back and the drawing is removed and we see the gallery wall overtaking the passepartout function for the nearly opaque glaspainting.
WITHDRAWINGWITHDRAWINGS. Is withdrawal itself withdrawn, begins all of a sudden the gift of the giving-to-see. So is appearance always a withdrawal symptom.
(extract from an essay by Lucien Lejande)
HINRICH WEIDEMANN lives in Berlin and Paris. His first exhibition took place in the Max Hetzler gallery. The new exhibition is our tenth common project and the second one man show in Berlin.
At the end of the year appears by him a special edition of „Vers un Jour de Buis", the new poem collection of the french poet Martin Ziegler at the Édition L.Mauguin, Paris; in spring a german edition of „L'Ecriture du Désastre" by Maurice Blanchot at Fink Verlag (together with Gerhard Poppenberg). A further publication with new works is in preparation.
Furthermore there are still some few prints of our catalogue with the essay „MASER". by WERNER HAMACHER, the up to now most profound study of Weidemannn's paintings.