Günther Förgpassage

Some of the watercolours presented here were made on sheets that were partly soiled. On sheets that had served as a support for painting other watercolours, or that lay within reach during this work, so that the artist could dab his brush on them and check this or that value of a colour. Such working papers, in the literal sense of the word, now became the basis of watercolours and paintings ranging from cheerful-seeming fields of stains to intense confrontations between differing principles of form. The beginnings of this new „pictorial language“, formed as it were out of themselves, of course also address the phenomenon of the horror vacui, which ambiguously demands that, on the one hand, the emptiness, the pure white of the sheet, be done away with, while at the same time this task arouses anxieties that make any mark all but impossible. Perhaps a connection can even be drawn to French Impressionism, which, in its search for a truthful visual understanding and depiction of the world, was thrown back literally upon the essence of the stain. For this stain is ultimately nothing other than the “tache” out of which the Impressionist image of the world is built up in painting as an extreme fragmentation of visible reality, and in these pictures we may indeed see the contemporary answer to this fragmentation of reality.

Exhibition:
Fuhrwerkswaage, Köln, 25/3 – 22/4/2007