Something between a thing and a feeling (an encounter)
As I am sitting writing, I am thinking of the paintings, as if they are memories formed from time and feeling in my own life, fleeting yet permanent, like ink spreading on damp paper.
At first an inconspicuous plastic cylinder, hidden away between stacks of old work. Then a freed emergence of paper, something like a butterfly from a chrysalis, but the analogy doesn’t feel quite right. Then an unravelling, slow and systematic as each scroll is raised – they feel larger than me and the endlessly vast space we are in and they break through into the wall behind and I want to climb through, over the ledge, and see what is beyond and breathe in air that is different to this one – and they are tacked to the white with torn pieces of masking tape. A performance, in a way, a collaborative and thoughtful act of exhibition, almost meditative.
What strikes me then is the quality of the pigment, a luminous surface that shines in the light, the warm, familiar scent of years old oil paint, thinking of the space between the floorboards and the bedframe in the bedroom of my later teen years. The way the light came through the window like tossed ribbon, reflecting off flecks of dust that made a permanent home in the air.
There is a sentimentality lingering here that I am trying to evade (not so successfully). It can cloud things. I am away from home; maybe I’m searching for parts of it in things I see, seeking out crumbs of comfort in the unfamiliar and wanting to feel like myself again. Yet it feels futile to resist these feelings, especially in these circumstances. I am writing about art.
The proof is in the pudding.
Johannes wants the works to reach, and if this is a measure of their success, then I would consider them successful. But then who am I to judge?
Like the images themselves, the paper rolls and twists and folds. Creases, time and accident embraced and appreciated.
I am thinking of the smell again, of oil enmeshed with paper and crushed earth, an alchemy of instances that have lead to this encounter. Colours pulse in and out of obscurity. There is an intimacy in the handling of the medium. An attentiveness to the moving scale of opacity and thinness that only paint can produce. Muscle sinew or milk obscuring damp moss. Brushstrokes are traces of the body’s vitality – I am standing in what was once the place of the artist, gestures like ghosts in the imagined space between here and there.
Again, the feeling of being able to step beyond the borders of the paper, feeling the paint as flesh or stone, feeling warmth or welcomed coolness, depending on the weather. I don’t want to leave this notion of ‘weather’ floating unexplained. The paintings feel everchanging and adaptable to whoever comes before them. For me they are comfort, mixed with things unanswered that keep me looking, and searching for more. Nothing is prescribed, however, and I am aware of my projection onto these paintings. I am also aware that I am aware. Maybe it’s the awareness that’s the selfish part.
How long is a piece of string?
The worlds exist somewhere between imagination and reality. A bird. A woman. A cell. A mother. A dripping cave. A leaf. A tree. A sky beyond. None of these things. Bodies in the grass. No bodies in the grass. A pink that finds its way through the cracks which unsettles me in an unnameable way. There is an intuition here that runs deep, and which reduces the significance of the object, a fluidity that overcomes solidity. Each brushstroke is a second in time and a distance in space.
There is a faithful dedication to each one of these works. Hearing the story of how they were created is a story of Johannes’ relationship to them. Instead of time taken, they are associated with where he was living, the spaces in which they came to be. Months and years built up in layers on paper and canvas. The feeling of the impossibility of doing anything else. An act of service perhaps. Paint as fabric that forms the arm that reaches.
I feel the search for connection at the root of his practice. Talking with Johannes I could hear it in his articulation of future plans for projects that connect people. His words conjure root networks and webs cast across land, a room of voices weaving and dissolving in the warmth of shared breath. I can’t shake the image of a reaching arm.
I feel like there should be a third italicised interruption here, but I won’t force it.
This period of painting practice has now come to a pause, or an end.
Gently peeling masking tape from the void of wall beneath, feeling torn corners from nails of previous showings. Like an animal retreating or hibernating, each plane draws back into itself. Energy preserved and contained, impossible to dissipate.
After all, this is paper that couldn’t be broken down. Johannes tells me that he didn’t plan on painting for so long, that he’d expected the paper to break down and give way to be made into something else. Alas, they were pretty sturdy.