Fragments of a Song by Felicity Lunn
Intense inky-black fingers of paint hover above an expanse of bright blue, their edges bleeding into the lighter spaces below. These more open areas are splattered with pink, a shimmering web of colour that pulls our gaze past the tight energy of the black forms to the calmer space and depth beyond. Like grains of sand, the pink splashes create a continual shift in perspective with the drawn green coils that sit on the surface, giving the black forms volume.
Enveloped by its scale and vibrancy, the translucent colours and floating forms in ŒLand of Spice give us an immediate impression of mobility. It is a dense image but the airier spaces diffuse the tension between the thickly drawn forms and broad monochrome washes of colour. It is difficult not to read the image as a landscape that we come across from a three-quarters perspective, the blue form demanding to be read as a river, viewed perhaps through an aeroplane window and obscured by clouds and other obstacles. But this watercolour drawing is pulled back into an abstract language by a number of elements. The bands of colour down each side frame the image and present it to us as a construct, a space created by and for the imagination rather than a depiction of reality. Paradoxically, this sense of entering a mental and emotional space is heightened by the scribbled green coils that sit on the surface of the image. In their trashy quality as nothing more than Œdoodles, dispersed seemingly casually across the image, these marks offer us a let-out, a layer of ordinariness that allows us to leave the intense abstract field of the image and enter a more transitional area between it and our own physical space. This sensation of being pulled in and out of the work is increased by its ability to give both the impression of skin and the sense of a universe, the close-up and an aerial perspective. We are moved across the drawing by the energy of the dark shapes and their suggestion of vegetation and growth, but also held still by the desire to feel a line or the detail of a form, to live the artistic process that produced it and allow its character to take effect on us. Personality radiates from the rings of orange that ground the more turbulent image below, each one with its own deliberate and unique Œmistake that prevents the work from becoming over-refined or too easy to look at.
From visual pleasure to emotional experience
Like any meaningful work of art, the acts of seeing, relating to and negotiating a painting by Alf Löhr set a complex temporal process in motion. In order to remain open to what they might reveal, we have to allow ourselves to be seduced by the paintings in the first instance, to be confronted directly by their generosity and the straightforwardness of the materials that the artist has restricted to fundamentals light, colour and water on paper. The most convincing paintings are those that sustain our initial impression of mobility. Certain details are placed to encourage this sense of entering the work the addition of yellow dots among the red in ŒWe like to believe our love is a private sentimentŒ and the loose spiral of drawing and tiny glow of orange in ŒThe paint drips to make snakes and upside down monkeys. These are all subtle illusions of the three-dimensional that shift our understanding of the work from being a flat surface to an image to be experienced from a number of perspectives.
The German word for seduction, Verführen, has a force that is missing from the English, a hint of being misled that comes close to the way in which Löhrs work takes the viewer through the immediate sensuousness to a darker and more complex environment. The colours start to communicate an edgy restlessness, maintaining a precarious balance between beauty and dissonance. The apparently harmonious palette is jolted out of complacency by acid colours, such as the yellows and pinks that in You laugh at our picture, you kiss it; for fondness I write your name have the effect of silent cries. In See the wind whispering to you the overall pink and red tones are given an uncomfortable nudge by the one small circle of yellow that shifts the painting from acting as a purely visual pleasure to being a physical and emotional experience. This is compounded by the gradual emergence of the temporal nature of Alf Löhrs work: the constant hovering between being fluid drawing and an image that is fixed produces directed silences that in turn stimulate and calm but never allow complacency. Löhr strives for imperfection, each action of mark-making on paper not just ritualistic but confirming too the human fragility of the artistic process. Tentative and open, the drawings feel their way forward but at the same time radiate the power of emotional exactitude. Tension between control and emotion is maintained through subdued, muted tones and bright colours, and through the tight graphic structure and the looser areas of paint. This process of opening up can be traced from the drawings made between 1997 and 1999, such as ŒNames that begin with L to a more expansive sense of space in the work made during the last two years. It is as though Löhr is increasingly allowing the picture surface to be a site of fantasy, the moment of trust in the viewers reception that turns paint on paper to pure emotion.
Process held in the gesture
The drawings retain the energy that was necessary to produce the range of textures: splattered shower of watercolour in Two sounds, heard together, occasional lines of more intractable acrylic, impasto details, washes of thin transparent colour, scribbled areas of drawing that contain within their movement the vigour of their making, and circles that announce the speed and agility with which they were painted. The resulting combination of directness and insubstantiality, the sense of appearance and disappearance, would not be achievable with the self-assuredness of oil paint. Logically, the scale of the drawings, their sense of gesture and timelessness make them ideally suited to oil on canvas but it is precisely the ambivalent qualities of drawing on paper that Löhr finds attractive. Crayon, pencil and watercolour only reveal their qualities over time. For him, a stack of completed papers has a tangible matter-of-factness while drawing is the most basic art form, representing self-awareness from an anthropological point of view, or the moment when you see yourself in relation to others and act upon it. Löhr makes the work horizontally, partly because the translucent quality is created by pools of water slowly being absorbed by the paper, but also as the way for him to engage with the materials. As importantly, he distinguishes between the physical directness of the circles when executed on the floor, and the intellectual quality they are inadvertently given when he reviews them more objectively on the wall.
Circular journeys
The circle has exercised the human mind since Greek philosophers first explored the properties of zero, the number that does not exist in itself but is crucial for mathematics. As both an open line and a closed form, the circle expresses shape and vacuum, both completion and eternity. Löhr literally begins each individual painting from point zero, using the space within the sphere as a container of light and the line as graphic mark or, at other times, the means to order colour. Unlike the Renaissance artist Giotto who, according to Vasari, drew a perfect circle freehand to prove his virtuosity, Löhrs spheres are deliberately flawed, expressive and intensely humane. In the earlier drawings, where the structure is limited to this single form, each circle creates a hermetic, self-contained sphere that throbs with its own pulse and nuances of colour. Occupying the in-between of drawing and painting, the circles convey an ambivalence about the creation of beauty. This has intensified in the more recent paintings where the spheres structure the colour and create rhythm, but push against this by unraveling anarchically or obscuring adjacent forms.
Below the surface
Part of Löhr’s intelligent play is to risk the banal, to exploit that which has become everyday or over familiar. The ordinariness of his materials and the appeal of his palette can deliberately lull us into a well-trodden sense of familiarity. Then, just as one grasps a superficial sense of the whole and comfortably consumes, an incendiary flash of red emerges out of a tight scribbled ball of brown, setting circles on a collision course, energising the now ennervated colours so that they get under our skin. In their material and emotional honesty the paintings show how the potentially commonplace can provide a rich source of complex meaning. The work echoes the attempts of artists in the middle of the twentieth century to play with the banal, from Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot to Mark Rothkos expression of space, both exploring how some of the most meaningful experiences arise out of vacuum and formlessness. Löhrs paintings also contain echoes of David Lynchs films that construct a picture of addictive sentimentality cracking open to reveal the messiness below the surface. Lynchs shots of undergrowth as metaphors for the desire that is concealed by the banal are paralleled by areas in Löhr’s paintings that, as though made with a microscopic camera, zoom in on the darkness that is hidden beneath the acceptable. They communicate an indefinable sense of loss that leads away from security to the strength that can grow out of facing fear and fragility. Just as the constructs created by Beckett, Rothko and Lynch suggest a human presence, so Löhr’s paintings are as much intimations of the tensions between people as they are an abstract structuring of physical space.
In Alf Löhr’s work the banal is mobilized in seeking for that which remains out of reach; it is about the relationship between presence and absence, the attempt to create meaning and harmony and the risk of losing or destroying it. The illusion of light and depth is held in suspense by the frenetically drawn coils of nervous energy that emerge in nearly every drawing and have the effect of suspending the work in their environment, gathering in the external space that surrounds them. Highly structured elements in the drawings composition the indication of a fragmented border to frame the image in Man under a toadstool the rows of graphic circles or the trails of paint that link one form with another in Kirikiri manipulate the viewers perceptual experience of the work. This desire for control, the means of ordering and making sense of abstract form and pure colour, is always threatened by disruption. It is as though the drawings are working through turbulence towards a hard-won state of stillness beyond temporal and spatial boundaries. In this sense, the drawings are about desire, the desire to create space for the imagination.
Abstraction
The dangers of attaching either an essentialist language to abstraction or interpretation based solely on the formal have not diminished since the first tentative experiments into non-objective art at the beginning of the twentieth century. Paul Klee understood that what a work is about is always tied to how it is made, the ability of the material to convey emotions and sensations that do not reproduce the visible but make visible. Klee demonstrated that the elements of painting lines, colours and forms are not just a means to an end, but have distinct characteristics as spatial agents in the picture plane. Similarly, in choosing to place a particular colour, Löhr is aware of its emotional register, the role it will play in the painting and the effect it will have on the colours near it. The paintings are caught in a transitory state between the actual and the imagined, description and meaning, our knowledge about the world and how we remember or perceive it. They contain within them the hard-won process of their making: how the placing of a mark on paper allows for the emotional quality of the abstract so that the lump of clay is not just clay anymore and not a cherry yet.
Conditioned by real objects into receiving the information that they yield up to us, we look for clues on how to read the paintings - suggestions of pictorial ideas such as the presence and weight of a human figure in Man under a toadstool and the filigree structure giving perspectival depth in Boy, those are pretty colours arent they?. Engaging with abstract painting is, however, a necessarily less predetermined process: it cannot comment but requests our attention and although it constitutes its own reality, it also accommodates both our memory as viewers and our various spontaneous responses. Alf Löhr compares the quality of the unknown in his work with the abstract state of all dramatically important things in life: love or sadness can be described in symbols but neither is a concrete thing. They are states in flux, moments of emotions that come and go as the spiritual, emotional and psychological perception outlive the material fact. His paintings suggest that it is not what we experience, but how we respond to what we experience that informs us: In a way I feel there is no abstract and when I paint I know the shabby or sad, the honest or strategic quality of a colour or a line, but I know it because I recognize it as a reflection of life. And I am pleased if the colour or the line reveals such qualities. Ironically, although his drawings have the appearance of being created with speed and vigour, their effect is that of slowness and hesitation. As with the work of other contemporary abstract painters such as Brice Marden or Richard Tuttle, you have to wait and see what it does to you, allowing it to articulate a complex group of sensations but without being given any absolutes to hold on to. Löhr is attempting to produce a feeling in the viewer that their mind matches with an abstract feeling of their own.
Seeking environments for art
This desire to communicate with the viewer links the different stages of Löhr’s career. The bronze cones that he placed around London on first arriving in 1986, as if seeking to physically fuse himself with the city; the fragile constructions that he made from Evian bottles in 1989; his intense engagement in the 1990s with new genre public art in the US and later with environmental and ecological issues all are linked to his belief that art should be an intervention into rather than an imposition on the world around. Choosing in the mid-1990s to return to painting, he has consciously positioned himself within a traditional medium, using its confines to contribute to a contemporary reconfiguration of its vocabulary. He has also sought out environments that offer a dialogue to contemporary art, places such as the anthropological Neanderthal Museum in Düsseldorf or Gloucester Cathedral. These are contexts in which, for Löhr, the fragility of life is sometimes more apparent than in a museum or gallery, where people do not expect to be confronted with art, but in which they are directly or subconsciously seeking meaning. In these two places the drawings did not present themselves as a formalized display. Rather they engaged visitors inadvertently, offering a visual translation of contemporary meanings of spirituality. In the Cathedral the drawings were placed discretely within the fabric of the building small ones high up in niches and on pillars, large work enclosed behind screens, propped up against tombstones or on the floor of a chapel announcing the temporary nature of their stay within this ancient monument. Some works blended in, absorbing and echoing the surrounding elements such as the quality of stone and the jewel-like colours of the stained glass, while others introduced new responses to the buildings complexity, its restrained eroticism, for example, and its role as a place of emotional exchange. The exhibition was entitled Useful Paintings, a reference to religious arts functional role as a conduit of faith but suggesting too that religious belief and abstract art can offer not information or certainty but a space of contemplation, a membrane between the material and metaphysical worlds.
Closing the space between techniques
One of the most provocative interventions in Gloucester Cathedral was the relationship constructed in one of the chapels between small drawings, large-scale photographs placed directly on the floor and a video projected discretely onto the stone wall of a niche. The interdependence of the media also demonstrated Löhr’s interest in mixing techniques and questioning the space between them, not for its own sake but as a means to activating the viewers ability to engage with an image. Photographs such as No. 21 present the gestural image that is produced from recording the ephemeral moment which occurs when a watercolour is exposed to water and starts to bleed and disperse. The gradual fading away of the painting and its simultaneous rebirth as the object of the photograph transfers the image from uneven absorption in paper to the sealed, reflective surface of the print. This process of conveying the same ideas in two media produces another kind of experience for the viewer that is as much a comment on how we relate differently to them, reading surface texture as an inherent part of our understanding of the painting, but looking past the gloss of the photographic paper to reach the image. However, Löhrs innovative use of the medium also parallels his exploration in the drawings, both techniques attempting to express the movement from one state to another, the fine distinction between creating and destroying, becoming and departing. Similarly, the videos contain the same ideas as the drawings, translated to a different medium. Whereas the drawings document the process of their production through thousands of marks, the video Circle captures just a few discrete moments, using a fluid medium to take back to basics the process of transformation that occurs when the circle of paint on paper begins to disperse. Transfiguration, a series of loosely interconnected scenes that explore the rhythm of moving water, translates to the fluidity of celluloid both the photographs expression of metamorphosis and the floating quality of the drawings. In Transfiguration the materiality of the changing light on the sea creates a mutual force with the sound of the waves that, in contrast to the closed space of the image, exploits videos ability to depict the passing of time as a meditative process.
The drawings, photographs and video are like fragments of conversations, constantly open to new interpretations according to their juxtaposition and environment. They suggest a journey, only revealing their qualities over time, the seemingly insubstantial detail often emerging as more significant than the elements that first seduce us. In its vulnerability as just colour on paper or a moment of metamorphosis held on camera or sketches made on video, Alf Löhr’s work relies not on the certainty of meaning but on the viewers trust and expectation that something imperceptible will be changed in them through the process of looking. Renegotiating notions of beauty and the aesthetic, it develops a new dynamic within abstraction that moves beyond the status of private expression, stimulating not merely subjective associations but an emotional richness and evoking a deeper form of recognition.
Zwischen Dichte und Luft von Felicity Lunn
Die ersten morgendlichen Sonnenstrahlen lagen noch im Atelier, als ich mir Alf Löhrs neue Bilder anschaute. Die Klarheit des Lichts durchdrang die Aquarelle und gab ihren kraftvollen Farben und Formen den Anschein, als schwebten sie über der Oberfläche des Papiers.
Während Löhr einzelnd und in chronologischer Abfolge Blatt für Blatt hervorholte, sprachen wir über das nomadenhafte Leben des Künstlers seit dem Abschluss seines Studiums in Düsseldorf: seine Aufenthalte in Amerika, Spanien und Deutschland, sowie seine Lehrtätigkeit in Glasgow und seine Residency in Cardiff/Wales.
Die Unruhe, dieses Suchen nach einer Umgebung, die es ihm erlaubt, seine künstlerischen und persönlichen Ziele zu verwirklichen, kommt zu einem gewissen Halt, als Löhr sich entschließt, in London zu leben. Dies zeigt sich auch dadurch, daß die Bilder die wir uns anschauen, konfliktfreier zu sein scheinen, als die intensive Auseinandersetzung des Künstlers mit verschiedenen Bereichen der Kunst im öffentlichen Raum. Dazu gehören z.B. die Environmental Art oder seine frühere Serie von Skulpturen für den Stadtraum London, die als anonyme Interventionen plaziert wurden und mit denen er versuchte, sich nach seiner Ankunft die Stadt geradezu physisch zu eigen zu machen. Obwohl eine gewisse Beständigkeit in Löhrs Leben einkehrte,fühlte ich, daß dieser Umstand seine Kunst nicht davon abbrachte, weiterhin nach neuen Grenzen zu suchen und sich immer wieder neu zu orientieren auf der Suche nach einem unsichtbaren Ziel. Dies verbindet die jetzigen großen Formate mit den kleinen, magischen Aquarellen, die in Transit von einem möglichen Zuhause zum anderen entstanden.
Die Bilder sind abstrakt, insofern nichts direkt oder wiedererkennbar abgebildet ist und doch werden gerade die ersten Aquarelle der Serie von einer leise angedeuteten Erzählung begleitet. Wie er mir sagte, hat für den Künstler ein Zeichen erst dann seine endgültige Form gefunden, wenn jedes einzelne eine eigene Persönlichkeit darstellt. Wie auch in seinen früheren Serien von Skulpturen, beschränkt Löhr sich in der Struktur der Aquarelle bewußt auf eine einzige Form.
Die Ganzheit der Kreise weckt Gedanken an Ewigkeit und Erfüllung. Jedes Element pulsiert wie ein eigenständiger Planet mit seinem ihm eigenen Ton. Einige haben grafische Qualitäten durch Ringe oder Konturen, die um die Kreise gezeichnet werden. Andere wieder saugen sich wie Flüssigkeit in die Oberfläche des Papiers. In minimalistischen Reihen stehen sie getrennt und beeinflussen sich doch in unserer Sehweise.
Die aufflammenden Rot- oder Ockertöne wetteifern mit den stilleren blauen und grünen Tönen, die dreidimensionalen Sphären scheinen die dahin geworfenen Punkte und feingliedrigen Zeichen aufzuladen. Hier und da fühlt man sich an Farbtafeln erinnert, mit Gruppierungen, die sich zu Rhythmen steigern und vertikal, horizontal oder diagonal die Fläche durchlaufen. Zu den bestechendsten gehören die Formen, die auf der Oberfläche auslaufen und in andere Kreise eintauchen, als ob sie sich gegen die formale Struktur der Reihen auflehnen wollten. Am verstörendsten wirken die Kritzeleien, die wie Umlaufbahnen das Bild durchziehen und den Einblick in die transparenten Gebilde hindern, geradeso, als würde der Künstler plötzlich vor der Schönheit, die er geschaffen hat, zurückschrecken.
Mein deutlichster Eindruck, den ich beim Betrachten seiner Bilder gewann, ist, daß Löhr sein Werk über die Jahre in eine Form gebracht hat, in der er durch eine geschickte Zweideutigkeit von Form und Inhalt den Punkt verhindert, an dem Kunst perfektionistisch und selbstgefällig wird.
Jedes Element, jeder Kreis beinhaltet einen Fehler, etwas Unvollkommenes, daß ausschlaggebend für seine Persönlichkeit ist und verhindert, daß das Kunstwerk abgehoben oder erhaben erscheint. So etwa in der Mitte der Serie taucht das Bild einer Katze zwischen den Kreisen auf, was den Betrachter irritiert und aus der Bahn wirft:
Ist diese Katze tot oder schläft sie?
Wollen wir uns durch das Bild im Bild, beim Lesen der abstrakten Zeichen stören lassen?
Unser Blick schwenkt hin und her zwischen denen im Fluß, schnell gesetzten spontanen Zeichen und der Fixierung durch die feinen Strukturen des toten Tieres. In dem direkt darauffolgenden Aquarell entzieht Löhr dem Bild die Gewichtigkeit und Schwere, die die Malerei mit sich bringt, indem er die Katze durch ein Photo ersetzt, daß einen aus alten Brettern zusammengenagelten Hirsch zeigt. Beide Eingriffe sind Symbole des Verlusts, nicht nur, weil die Tiere tatsächlich oder metaphorisch tot sind, sondern auch, weil sie sich nur sehr unbequem in die Mobilität der Kreise einfügen lassen. Alf Löhr hat mit einer Reihe von Experimenten versucht, vereinfachte Bezüge zu anderen Medien zu vermeiden. Die Arbeiten mit den photographischen Eingriffen sind z.B. so angelegt, daß sie sich über das ganze Papier erstrecken, die Kreise werden von dem Papierrand abgeschnitten. Hier ensteht eine wechselseitige Wirkung:
ohne das Bild im Bild könnten die abstrakten Zeichen zu Fragmenten werden, die an endlose Computerausdrucke erinnern. In einer anderen Serie wird das Malerische durch eine konzeptuelle Image + Text-Strategie durchbrochen, indem er Namen unter einige Kreise einfügt.
Erneut vom Kurs abgebracht, fragte ich mich zunächst, ob die Verwendung von Namen nicht doch zu persönlich sei und ob man einem so abgegrasten Medium, das schon von vielen amerikanischen Künstlern auf die Spitze getrieben worden ist, noch etwas abgewinnen könne. Jedoch wie bei allen Arbeiten von Löhr, bedarf die Interpretation eine gedankliche Verschiebung, ein Überdenken, und so merkte ich bald, daß die Konzeption der Bilder und Ihre Namen sehr präzise in einen Zwischenraum plaziert sind, in dem sie zwischen Sein und nicht Sein schweben und sich deshalb nie als Schriftzeichen oder Text fixieren lassen.
Der Name eines Individuums ist ein Markenzeichen, eine Charakterisierung einer Persönlichkeit, doch hier wird auf ironische Weise sichtbar gemacht, daß Namen eben nur die Unzulänglichkeit beschreiben und somit gerade den fehlenden Zusammenhang von Zeichen auf Papier und Zeichen menschlicher Identifizierung beschreiben.
Auch hier vermeidet der Künstler eine festgeschriebene Antwort und zieht die Unsicherheit der Bewegung der erstarrten Form vor. Neben den Bildern mit Namen entstehen im gleichen Zeitraum Auseinandersetzungen mit verschiedenartigen Texturen. Im Arbeitsprozeß werden die Blätter, nachdem die Kreise formuliert sind, in ein Wasserbecken getaucht und naß mit Pigmenten weiter bearbeitet. Löhr öffnet sich hier dem Element des Zufalls; eine Vorgehensweise, die sich durch spontane, kräftige Kreise in vorangenden Arbeiten schon angekündigt hat. Das Zerstreuen der Pigmente erzeugt eine Dichte und Durchlässigkeit, die die Kreise zusammenlaufen läßt und sie in tonalen Verschiebungen einbettet. Während das reine Weiß der frühen Arbeiten Ruhe erzeugt, wird der Betrachter nun dazu verführt, sich auf eine neue Dynamik einzulassen, die durch die Hintergrundpigmente insziniert wird. Eine erneute Ebene der Zweideutigkeit wird erzeugt, in der uns der braune Untergrund auffordert zu ergründen, wie die Spähren den Raum besetzen und wie sich dies auf unsere Wahrnehmung auswirkt. Was in einem Moment wie Haut erscheint, erscheint gleich darauf wie ein eigenes Universum, ständig wird man von scharf gestellten in unscharfe Zonen geführt und bewegt sich im auf und ab zwischen mikroskopischer Vergrößerung und einer Luftaufnahmen.
Was mich an den Arbeiten von Alf Löhr fasziniert, ist, mit welcher Schnelligkeit er sich von der widerspenstigen Dichte zu den weit geöffneten Atmosphäre der jetzigen Arbeiten bewegt, in denen die feingliedrigen Umrißlinien der Kreise quer über das Papier ineinander verschmelzen und von Licht durchtränkt werden.
Zu aufbrausend, um eindeutig Malerei zu sein, zu offen den Zufall respektierend, als daß es Zeichnungen sein könnten, sind diese Aquarelle ein Ausdruck von fortwährendem Entstehen. Vielleicht ist es Löhrs unabläßliches Bemühen die Schönheit, die er sieht, nicht einzusperren, um eine fragwürdige Fixierung der Ästhetik zu vermeiden, die seinen Arbeiten diese gewisse besorgte Unruhe gibt, die mich fesselt und durch die sie doch die Qualität einer "anderen Welt " besitzen.