"DANIEL LERGON. EIGENGRAU" BY PETER LODERMEYER
I.Let us begin by considering the first picture in this book: a square painting from 2009, measuring 130 by 130 centimeters, painted with transparent lacquer on a gray, retroreflective canvas, and, like all of Daniel Lergon’s works, untitled. From the first look on develops the age-old game of the painted picture, or one might also say: the age-old magic of painting, effective since the first cave paintings, when someone captured the outline of his or her hand on a rock face for whatever, long since forgotten reason. Figure on ground—and the magical, undefined space of the picture ground, which is no longer completely identical to the material surface, already opens up. The interpretive game of viewing, the search for comparability begins so as to provide an interpretation of this never-before-seen figure. Positioned in the middle of the picture field, it is possible to see an approximately square form, clearly delimited from the background; it has sufficient space on all sides to develop undisturbed in this uniformly gray picture space. Slightly distorted and nevertheless reinforcing the square surrounding shape of the painting, it stands there alien-familiar, with a clear outline, a brightly gleaming contour—or at least that is how it looks in the photograph. One immediately begins to ask oneself what kind of thing it is that appears so concretely-vaguely before one’s eyes. The irregularities of the inner structure, in particular the bright line at the upper right, virtually demand a spatial, three-dimensional reading of the nonetheless flat entity. A block? A log? A roll tapered toward the top? The insuppressible need for signification, which is only quelled through the practice of seeing nonrepresentational painting, the illusionistic, underlying feeling of “that reminds me of . . .” and “that looks like . . .” is always at the ready. What stands directly in front of one’s eyes is supposed to be a sign for something different—even if no convincing comparison wants to present itself.
Things then become complex when one has the original, not the photo, before one’s eyes, when one is confronted with a painting on a retroreflective picture medium—perhaps for the first time. When the painting changes with every step, no matter in which direction, the light becomes darker, the dark becomes lighter, parts of the picture suddenly flash up, while others retreat, contrasts intensify or disappear. When one has the experience that the changes in the appearance of the picture are dependent on the movement of one’s own body, but are deprived of arbitrariness, because what can be seen occurs according to physical laws. And then the sudden insight that light is the most important element in this picture, not the figure on the ground, which continues to stubbornly resist objective identification. It is increasingly light with its various manifestations and changes that draw attention to itself in the process of viewing the real thing, light as a contingent basis and prerequisite for all visibility. Retroreflective fabric, which has the characteristic of primarily reflecting light back in the direction from which it comes, was not developed for painting; it is used above all as a screen for picture and film projections and in safety clothing. When it is painted with transparent, colorless lacquers, surprising refraction effects arise, and the picture is removed from its static state and made into a continually changing entity. This, of course, means that photographic reproductions can always only be intimations, random views from only one perspective and in one lighting situation. The retroreflective pictures cannot be adequately reproduced. Since the paintings react directly to light, with its changing conditions, which depend on the angle of incidence, the amount of light, the viewer’s vantage point, and so on, since they consequently undergo a most astonishing change of appearance due to their light sensitivity, they have the unusual characteristic of directly coupling the light in the picture and real, illuminating light with one another. The experiences that one has as a viewer when confronted with this fact are an inseparable part of the life of the picture. What is shown here is that seeing painting is not only about grasping the objective facts of the picture—the eye is not merely a sensory recording device—but that all the complex perceptions in combination with movement, physical sensation, and sense of space are involved as well.
In connection with Lergon’s retroreflective pictures, reference is again and again made to the psychological concept of personal space for good reason. This term denotes physical awareness, or, more precisely, an awareness of the scope of sensations, action, and disposition of our body, beyond which external space begins—admittedly, with flowing transitions between them. Interestingly, as a viewer, I experience the paintings on a retroreflective ground as incorporated in my personal space, because they do, indeed, interact with me, meaning that I am able to influence changes in their appearance. Seeing and moving are directly interconnected; here, the eye of the viewer is definitely a “mobile eye.”1 At the same time—and this is the astonishing thing—I experience myself as if incorporated in the “personal” space of the painting, by which I’d like to say: I ascribe the picture its own individual space, since I indeed experience how it reacts directly to me and my movements as a quasi-subject. I experience the picture as an opposite by which I, as it were, feel perceived: What we see looks at us.2
Indeed, the physical reflection of light back in the direction of the incidence of light can be linked metaphorically with turning seeing back on itself and its circumstances. Lergon addressed this twofold meaning of the term reflection in his exhibition Reflexion on the occasion of the Mediations Biennale in Poznań (Poland) in 2012. “Seeing seeing” (a primary term in “the Iconic” of Max Imdahl3) becomes reflexive as a “seeing of seeing seeing.” Seeing is not a purely sensory, but instead always a complex cognitive-recognitive process. The becoming reflexive of the viewer-subject is not expressed anywhere in Lergon’s painting as clearly as in the pictures painted on bright retroreflective canvases, when they hang in the light in such a way that the light source is located behind the viewer, whose shadow thus falls on the canvas and, due to the reflective properties of the material, has a halo of light, a nimbus. The co-constituting role of the viewer for the reality of the picture is therefore manifested: “The viewer is in the picture,” according to the fundamental theorem of the aesthetics of reception4—and Lergon simultaneously succeeds (also one of Imdahl’s expressions) in “ennobling [the viewer] auratically.”5 Lergon visualized this optical phenomenon and its significance for the reception of pictures in 2008 with the exhibition nimbi at the Galerie Christian Lethert in Cologne.
II.
Daniel Lergon is an artist who, like many others, produces series of works—or at least he himself speaks of “series,” and the word is also used in the other texts in this catalogue. I, however, prefer to speak of “sequences,” because the term picture series implies that specific factors in the form of the picture are varied, and therefore that there is one picture precept that is adhered to systematically, which results in the fact that one individual work can only be understood completely when its position within the picture series is grasped as well. None of this is the case in Lergon’s works. The inner linkage in his sequences of works is provided by the choice of working materials—means of painting as well as picture carrier. But, other than that, the form of every picture is individually distinct. In the case of the paintings on gray, retroreflective fabric, not only very different forms are developed: those with closed contours, as in the painting first considered, stand next to open forms in which the splatters of lacquer, striations, and smudges suggest swift, gestural application. But, above all, the picture formats considerably differ from one another. In the sequence of retroreflective pictures, there are square formats as well as rectangular formats hung horizontally and vertically, but also tondi, hence paintings with a circular shape. The picture dimensions also vary widely and range between a relatively small 130 by 100 and a huge 270 by 720 centimeters. What is concerned in a sequence of pictures is therefore not serially working through a problem of form, but rather a sort of sequence of experiments in which various pictorial possibilities are sounded out.
III.
In this publication, three sequences of works are presented, all of which can, in turn, be subdivided further based on the different picture carriers. The first sequence comprises the paintings with transparent lacquer on retroreflective, gray, white, or black fabric. The second sequence comprises pictures painted with various powdered metals on walls, paper, or canvases coated with metal. The third sequence of works comprises ones in which Lergon painted with acidified water on a ground of iron, copper, or zinc. The striking commonality of all three sequences is the fact that they are respectively not conventional paintings with pigments, with “colors” in the traditional sense, and, likewise, that the characteristics of the picture carrier are vitally important to the appearance of each painting. The intrinsic color of the retroreflective canvases—to linger a moment longer on this sequence of works—is, consequently, in no way an incidental factor, but instead also greatly contributes to influencing the effect of the painting. In the pictures on a gray ground, the changeability of their appearance as a result of the incidence of light and the viewer’s vantage point is particularly apparent. In the case of those on a white ground, in contrast, the changes are subtler. The white ensures that, as a result of the transparent, colorless lacquer that was applied, the refractions of light, depending on the viewing angle, make the painted surfaces appear completely or partially or disappear again—a game of visibility and invisibility. The effects of the refraction of light are much less noticeable in the case of the black canvases, since they absorb a great deal of the light. Here, due to the dark background that reflects the layers of lacquer, the contrast between the glossy and matte areas of the canvas appears much more intensively than in the lighter variants. The painted areas look much darker and compacter than they do in the gray and white pictures.
IV.
Daniel Lergon consistently refuses to title his pictures, but he always gives his exhibitions names as well as short texts that often come from the field of the natural sciences. Some of the exhibition titles refer to characteristics of the works or to visual effects that can be observed in them. The aforementioned exhibitions Reflexion and nimbi are examples of this. In other titles, phenomena that have an analogy to particular characteristics of the pictures are mentioned. This applies, for example, to the exhibition Whiteout, which took place at the Almine Rech Gallery in Paris in 2011. Whiteout denotes the particular meteorological condition that can be observed in polar regions and high mountain ranges when a snow-covered surface and the sky become indistinguishable and the horizon line between them disappears when particular lighting conditions prevail due to the weather. It is not necessary to elaborate this further here, since it is clear that the white retroreflective pictures that Lergon showed in the exhibition do not illustrate or even represent this phenomenon, but have a reduced contrast analogous to it—caused optically in a completely different way—which effects that the contour lines of the painted forms disappear and are able to blur with the white surface areas. Other exhibition titles, on the other hand, can only be linked with the works being presented through free association, for instance, 3000 K (Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna, 2011), a title that refers to the temperature of the early universe at the point in time—some 380,000 years after the Big Bang—when matter and radiation separated and the universe was, consequently, flooded with light for the first time.
The titles and the scientific explanations for them are, understandably, popular springboards for everyone who writes about or reports on Daniel Lergon’s works. They supposedly provide clues for interpreting his nonrepresentational pictures. At the same time, there is a danger of misunderstanding them to some extent, as if they were an explanation of the pictures or even their motifs or subjects. Daniel Lergon is not a natural scientist and also does not want to provide any scientific instruction. The exhibition titles do not explain the pictures, and the pictures do not illustrate the phenomena or circumstances named in the titles. But what is then the function or even the artistic strategy behind the titles and texts? Lergon himself calls them “small pop science anecdotes that are interesting . . . and refer to something that might be a metaphor for the pictures.”6 That sounds less harmless than it is. In my opinion, the artistic significance of the “pop science anecdotes” lies in meeting expectations with respect to an advanced form of painting in an intelligent way and evading them at the same time. With his experimental methods of painting pictures without using color or pigments in the process, Lergon’s painting concept corresponds to the modernist postulate of material development. His nonrepresentational manner of painting excludes anything depictive or narrative. The postulate of media specificity, which goes back to Clement Greenberg and his successors, says that everything that is not inherent in painting as such can be eradicated from the medium of painting. Through his choice of exhibition titles, Lergon, at the same time, liberates his pictures from this far-too-narrow framework of self-reference, though he does not link the pictures, but rather the exhibitions, with an “anecdotal” assertion.
An exhibition is the format in which he presents his pictures and introduces them to the public and, hence, to us as viewers. With the titles and texts, he addresses viewers directly and creates an echo or reverberation chamber for perceiving his pictures. What he achieves through doing so is worldliness. Painting should not only be imprisoned in the straitjacket of reflecting the essence of painting itself, but always also—be it merely in a tiny splinter or fragment—makes an assertion about the perception of the world. Every artwork with aspiration says something about how we perceive the world or might perceive it. By suggesting something about the nature of the universe, matter, light, and perception with his exhibition titles and scientific anecdotes, Lergon opens up a resonance chamber for seeing his pictures and intimates a relevance that goes beyond art. This also applies to the title of this publication, Eigengrau. This is what one (Wikipedia knowledge!) calls the color seen “in the absence of light. . . . Researchers noticed early on that the shape of intensity-sensitivity curves could be explained by assuming that an intrinsic source of noise in the retina produces random events indistinguishable from those triggered by real photos.” With closed eyes, one also sees something, a gray color, which the seeing apparatus brings forth through its independent activity—an excellent metaphor for the fact that every viewer always brings his or her own share of a particular mode of perception to the pictures he or she sees. Once again: the human eye is not a sensory apparatus; seeing is a complex activity.
V.
At first glance, it looks as if a crack were running through the wall, almost like a torn curtain. When viewed up close, it becomes clear: quite the contrary, for it is not an opening, but something that is applied to the wall instead. The vertical line, which is quite frayed at the edges, tapers toward the top, thus giving it a bit of the appearance of a spruce tree from which all the branches have been removed. The material looks lusterless and grainy at close range: the form is a wall painting that was produced at the Vergez Collection in Buenos Aires in 2011 with copper powder, which was made into a kind of paint through the addition of an acrylic binder. Work with metals—whether as a paint material, as a picture background, or sometimes both at the same time—has played a central role in Lergon’s artistic experiments in recent years. At the same time, special significance is attached to the wall paintings, because they, unlike the works on canvas or paper, are site-specific, generally only exist for the short duration of the exhibition, and incorporate the real, particular space in a very special way. In the wall works with bonded metal powder, the picture has no clear, material boundary. The painted form—one is almost tempted to say: the painted formlessness or dissolution of form—activates the wall surface around it, activates whole parts of the space. What one perceives as still part of the work or as external to it depends very much on one’s perspective, personal perception, and sense of space. This method of incorporating the given spatial conditions and altering them by means of applying metal particles is perceived that much more strongly the more “information” the space already brings with it, therefore, the less it corresponds to the ideal of a perfect white cube. The painting with iron powder at the Byla Synagoga in Poznań for the Mediations Biennale in 2012 is therefore painted over the joints in the masonry wall and also the electrical wiring mounted on it, and therefore appears to be an intervention that alters the space itself.
The wall pictures are, in each case, monochrome, hence produced with a single kind of metal—for instance, iron, copper, tin, or zinc—so that there are no color contrasts or modulations. As a result, the spatial illusionism is suppressed and the “color” is perceived as what it is, namely, metal powder on the wall. Its material properties are emphasized as a result of the fact that Lergon, rather than painting clearly contoured areas, smudges and distributes the material, applies it with a tendency toward the amorphous, at times, simply as a sort of scattered, porous trace. Characteristic of this is the wall picture painted with hammer paint, iron-oxide black, in the exhibition Iapetus at the Kunstverein Mönchengladbach in 2010. The heavy, dark, rounded shape seems to dissolve at the upper edge, to “evaporate,” while a long, smudged trace gives the impression that the material has been liberated from the form and blown to the left by an imaginary wind. Lergon conceived the wall paintings as a conscious counterpole to the retroreflective pictures, which, as we have seen, work with light and the effects of light. Light and matter are the two poles between which his art is situated. This polarity has been addressed in various exhibitions, among others, in the abovementioned exhibition 3000 K, whose title alludes to the separation of light and matter in the early universe.
VI.
Powdered metal can be used not only as a painting material; when it is evenly applied on a ground—for example, a canvas—it is also a perfect painting surface. Base metals have the ability to react to oxygen, therefore to oxidize, to start rusting. Based on this, Lergon has developed a special painting technique in which he spreads acidified water, hence water to which small amounts of an acid have been added, on a metal ground. As in the lacquer in the retroreflective pictures, Lergon works with a transparent, colorless substance here as well. The process of acid corrosion starts on the processed areas; the metal oxidizes and begins to change color. It therefore involves a type of painting in which no pigment is applied to the painting surface, but the chemical potential of the metal is activated instead, and subsequently brings forth colors “automatically” based on the laws of chemistry. A comparable approach is familiar from Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings of the years 1977–78. With their splatters and trickles, they look like a chemical variation, or, more precisely: an ironic take on Abstract Expressionism—all the more, since the oxidation processes in the works was supposedly triggered by the urine of the artist and his assistants, thus giving the paintings the sobriquet Piss Paintings. Daniel Lergon’s oxidation pictures have nothing to do with a drastic, ironic commentary on abstraction. At first glance, they already clearly set themselves apart from the drip-and-splatter aesthetic of the Piss Paintings by evincing a very careful, nuanced treatment of the painting surface and produce complex forms that result from several work steps of distributing and smudging the acidified water. In comparison to his other sequences of works, the oxidation pictures most strongly display an—in the traditional sense—painterly character, which is based on the heightened colorfulness and the very nuanced modulation of color, which again and again facilitates an illusionistic plasticity and organic-seeming quality of form. The color effects differ greatly depending on the material that was used as a painting ground. In the case of iron, there are various brightness levels of rust brown, in the case of zinc, diverse shades of gray, while copper, with its many hues of verdigris, gives rise to the largest spectrum of color nuances and modulation possibilities, and, at the same time, the greatest contrast to the original color, typical copper red.
In conclusion, let us also take a look at the final picture in this book: an upright rectangular painting from 2014 that measures 200 by 130 centimeters, painted with water on zinc on canvas, and, like all of Daniel Lergon’s works, remains untitled. From the very first look on, it develops the age-old game of the painted picture: figure on ground—and the search for familiarity and comparability, so as to give this never-before-seen figure an interpretation, already begins. Taking up nearly the entire picture field, cut off only by the lower edge, it is possible to see a figure that inevitably gives rise to anthropomorphic or zoomorphic associations. A mysteriously horned head seems to sit on a torso, while an angled extremity ending in a club-like stump stretches out to the left. The gestural painting, which originates from the chemical properties of the carrier material zinc, is here taken to the utmost limit of what can still be considered nonrepresentational. It takes only little effort for the personal contribution of the viewer’s gaze to recognize an opposite in the picture, whatever it might be called.
Notes:
The fact that concepts such as the “mobile eye” and “physical” or “peripatetic seeing” also comprise a fruitful research paradigm with respect to older art is further substantiated by the texts in: David Ganz and Stefan Neuer, eds., Mobile Eyes: Peripatetisches Sehen in den Bildkulturen der Vormoderne (Munich, 2013).
2 Georges Didi-Huberman, Was wir sehen blickt uns an: Zur Metapsychologie des Bildes (Munich, 1999).
3 On the frequent use of this expression in Imdahl’s work, see the subject index in Max Imdahl, Reflexion Theorie Methode: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Gottfried Boehm (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), p. 725 (keywords “Sehen, sehendes” and “Sehen, sehendes und wiedererkennendes”).
4 Wolfgang Kemp, ed., Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik (Cologne, 1991).
5 Imdahl, Reflexion Theorie Methode, p. 252.
6 Daniel Lergon, email to the author, August 7, 2017.