In Scrollpainting137 fragile turns, Elisabeth Sonneck will present the current development of her long-term project La vie florissante – Les fleurs du macabre, for the first time including materials of her site specific research in Die (South France) in 2020: unedited cell phone documentary, and – to develop an inner colour memory – colour sketches in multi-layered, slow brushstrokes.

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There, she investigated the detailed colour spectra of natural and artificial flowers, which initially resemble their natural models, each in their decay. While fading in sunlight, an increasingly striking difference emerges. The flower itself is already a metaphor for the dialectical, indissoluble intertwining between life and death. Sonneck's view of this subject liquefies the metaphor into the colour spectra of temporal states, in the field of tension between nature and artificiality.

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Without representational recourse, she focuses perception purely on the concrete nuances of colour and its inherent emotional reality. Sonneck's painterly work emphasizes the immediate working process: multiple staggered ends of the semi-transparent brushstrokes show the emergence of colour nuances and rhythm, in sharp dissonances as well as in barely noticeable shifts.

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Transience and fragility also appear in Sonneck's temporary site-specific installation at Galeria NAVE – “Scrollpainting 137 fragile turns” shows a precariously balanced situation with the material tension of long, painted paper rolls which Sonneck normally installs without nails or screws. In the midst of this temporary environment, the viewer creates individual, fragmentary, flowing views depending on her/his current position and physical movement: in colour.

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Ulrich Loock

in: Elisabeth Sonneck - In Color, Site specific Painting, Works 2006 – 2011, ed. Modo Verlag, Freiburg 2012

 

 

(...) Sonneck’s paintings can be described as experiments resulting in specific, unplanned, yet satisfying images for which no pre-established norms exist. These images are emphatically singular. In contrast to claims of scientific research they eschew generalisations. If an extensive practice results in experience that directs and impacts on the production of subsequent works, each new work implies an increase in experience, and precisely not its reduction to totalizing abstraction. The fact that, in the studio, Sonneck usually paints three works based on the same idea, underlines the distinct singularity of each individual work, none of which closes off the complete range of options nor encompasses all possibilities; rather each formulation suggests other formulations. In contrast to scientific research each result expands the field of possibilities (...)

 

Painting is shown to be the direct outcome of a specific sequence of physical activities, just as these, in turn, are a result of the painting requirements. The application of paint and physical movement become inextricable; brushstrokes obtain a seismographic character (…).

 

The body-related particularity of each individual brushstroke animates the painting in a way that is hardly perceptible but nevertheless palpable. This vitalisation is an involuntary result of painterly pragmatics; it appears unintentional and it is left to the viewer to grasp it. It is somatic and not expressive: the sediment of physical action does not translate any psychic movement, but remains bound in simple corporeal operations. Insofar as this painting is based on a pragmatic economy of means, it follows the scholastic maxim of not increasing entities beyond necessity. This economy also includes the exclusive use of brushes twelve centimetres wide for the production of the individual bands of paint; the differing widths of the bands are due solely to the lateral superimposition of brushstrokes. The dependence of the painting ́s elements on physical possibilities and necessities excludes any significance beyond the economics of the paint application, whilst facilitating the perception of the colours and their interrelationships. (...)

 

The simple vestiges of process and the unpretentiousness of the seismographic traces of a physical operation – counteracting any theatricality – contradict in a certain way the visual manifestation of the painting. Namely, bands of paint are placed next to each other and superimposed on one another in such numbers that it becomes impossible to trace the painting’s construction to its origins. On the contrary, the certainties of the economic pragmatics of its production, mediated by the painting itself, rub against the irreducible appearance of the work before us. It is precisely the transparency and comprehensibility of the production process that underscore the ineluctability of the visual reality. (...)

 

Consequently, there is no underlying criterion for the selection of colours that is continually adapted throughout the process of painting. This absence of a consistent orientation is yet another fact contributing to the uniqueness of each individual painting and the infinite number of possible manifestations. Following the first reaction to the predetermined colour field, it is then entirely left to the originality of the painter’s decisions in which direction to proceed in developing the interrelationships of colour. Inevitably the issue of absence of aesthetic norms in modernism arises, namely the question of when to stop, that is, when a picture should be considered finished. Sonneck has commented: “The criteria for this are difficult to identify; but the point is relatively clear, a kind of fluid tension.” (…)

 

The formal structuring of the pictorial field by means of contradictions and their reversals leads to a dynamic balance, counteracting any ossification of visual facts. One might say that the painting’s process-bound form of production is translated into the simultaneous movement of the finished painting, just as the painting conversely retains a memory of the physical procedure of its own production.

A significant clue to the production process can be gleaned from the bands in the works since 2008 (with a precedent from 2007) that do not continue right to the edges: they testify to the multiple overlaying of brushstrokes, a procedure contributing to a further vitalising of the painterly structure in that the brush, on being lifted from the surface deposits a denser area of paint. (…) Sonneck’s practice of on-going experimentation focuses on formulations of colour that “is indefinable, and also not really imaginable and instable, as well as being infinite in the possible spectrum of hues.” Her studio painting is the site of this unremittingly repeated experiment. Site-specific paintings are its disruption at a specific location and a specific time.

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Ulrich Loock was born in 1953 in Braunschweig (Germany) and currently lives as an art critic, curator and teacher in Berlin. From 1985 to 2010, he served as director and deputy director at Kunsthalle Bern, Kunstmuseum Luzern and Museu de Serralves. For more than 30 years, he organized exhibitions of artists of his generation as well as other generations, participated in editing catalogs for exhibitions, presented lectures in different parts of the world and contributed to several publications.