Christoph Schellberg
14 Mar - 16 May 2015
CHRISTOPH SCHELLBERG
14 March – 16 May 2015
With this untitled exhibition, Christoph Schellberg present a collection of drawings the artist made over the past seven years. Not paintings. Not gouaches. Not drawings with paint, though some of the compositions, its lines thick, colors vibrant, might be easily mistaken for it. Drawings. What the artist puts on display, what he wishes to share with us, are drawings.
We often think of drawing and painting in the same vein. We occasionally use the words interchangeably. Yet if we consider our vocabulary more closely, we can see that they refer to two rather different modalities. If you paint, you apply paint onto something. You cover a surface, you apply color onto a wall. Drawing, by contrast, is done from somewhere. One draws from experience; one traces a line printed elsewhere. Both painting and drawing are transitive verbs, designating a movement from somewhere to elsewhere. The difference is that painting specifies the elsewhere whereas drawing refers exclusively to the somewhere. Indeed, etymologically, the former stems from the Sanskrit peik-, which means “to cut”, whilst the latter has its roots in the Saxon dragan: to drag, to pull. Painting, peik-, motions the direction the knife is going; drawing, dragan, indicates where it’s coming from.
In this sense, drawing and painting differ in two respects. First, painting meditates the relationship between the hand and the external world, i.e. the surface or the wall, whereas drawing reflects on the interaction between the hand and the corporeality of which it is part: body, mind, the whole shebang. Second, related to this, painting designates an end product; it is marked by an almost teleological finality. Drawing, on the other hand, refers to a process. Once you’ve cut someone, the fight is over. Drawing the knife means it still has to begin. Indeed, a painting is to a drawing what a building is to the architect’s plan; the drawing is not the cut but the specter of the cut. If this makes drawing less immediately incisive, it also makes it more hauntingly experimental, a space, literal and metaphorical, for trying out different speeds and moves of pulling out the knife.
Some time ago I visited the exhibition ‘Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015’ at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. As the title suggests, the show contemplated a century of abstraction in art, from the early twentieth century modernist utopianism of Malevich to the poststructuralist deconstruction of the everyday popular in the 1980s; from those projects which conceived abstraction as a model for life, to the ones that perceived it as a representation of it. There were paintings by Mondrian, photographs by Rodchenko, collages by Holzer, a wool sculpture by Trockl and even a light installation by Dan Flavin. I remember seeing a fragment of Leger’s film Ballet Mechanique. But a genre that wasn’t part of the retrospective, not really at least, was drawing. The history of abstraction in art, so it seemed, was a history of statements rather than experiments. I am no art historian, but from the little I know about twentieth century abstraction, I am pretty sure this is not true. But even if it were, I would wish it wasn’t. The power of abstraction lies not in what it is, but in what it may be – the power it yields is not one of iteration but of continuous reconfiguration.
Christoph Schellberg’s major achievement in this exhibition is to return this sense of experimentation to the canon of abstract art. Drawing out white zones on organically colored paper, outlining forms in all shapes, sometimes thick, other times fragile, now resonating with the paper qualities, then contrasting with them, tracing the possibilities of three-dimensional shadows without actualising them, keeping the tension between the two and three-dimensional virtual, he revives abstraction not by cutting the already dead body of the tradition, but by re-envisioning new ways to pull his knife. The exhibition in the White Chapel gallery documented the history of abstraction. Schellberg’s drawings here mark its future – not any one future in particular, but the possibility of many futures, all to be found, all to be discovered, if you just look close enough.
Timotheus Vermeulen
14 March – 16 May 2015
With this untitled exhibition, Christoph Schellberg present a collection of drawings the artist made over the past seven years. Not paintings. Not gouaches. Not drawings with paint, though some of the compositions, its lines thick, colors vibrant, might be easily mistaken for it. Drawings. What the artist puts on display, what he wishes to share with us, are drawings.
We often think of drawing and painting in the same vein. We occasionally use the words interchangeably. Yet if we consider our vocabulary more closely, we can see that they refer to two rather different modalities. If you paint, you apply paint onto something. You cover a surface, you apply color onto a wall. Drawing, by contrast, is done from somewhere. One draws from experience; one traces a line printed elsewhere. Both painting and drawing are transitive verbs, designating a movement from somewhere to elsewhere. The difference is that painting specifies the elsewhere whereas drawing refers exclusively to the somewhere. Indeed, etymologically, the former stems from the Sanskrit peik-, which means “to cut”, whilst the latter has its roots in the Saxon dragan: to drag, to pull. Painting, peik-, motions the direction the knife is going; drawing, dragan, indicates where it’s coming from.
In this sense, drawing and painting differ in two respects. First, painting meditates the relationship between the hand and the external world, i.e. the surface or the wall, whereas drawing reflects on the interaction between the hand and the corporeality of which it is part: body, mind, the whole shebang. Second, related to this, painting designates an end product; it is marked by an almost teleological finality. Drawing, on the other hand, refers to a process. Once you’ve cut someone, the fight is over. Drawing the knife means it still has to begin. Indeed, a painting is to a drawing what a building is to the architect’s plan; the drawing is not the cut but the specter of the cut. If this makes drawing less immediately incisive, it also makes it more hauntingly experimental, a space, literal and metaphorical, for trying out different speeds and moves of pulling out the knife.
Some time ago I visited the exhibition ‘Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015’ at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. As the title suggests, the show contemplated a century of abstraction in art, from the early twentieth century modernist utopianism of Malevich to the poststructuralist deconstruction of the everyday popular in the 1980s; from those projects which conceived abstraction as a model for life, to the ones that perceived it as a representation of it. There were paintings by Mondrian, photographs by Rodchenko, collages by Holzer, a wool sculpture by Trockl and even a light installation by Dan Flavin. I remember seeing a fragment of Leger’s film Ballet Mechanique. But a genre that wasn’t part of the retrospective, not really at least, was drawing. The history of abstraction in art, so it seemed, was a history of statements rather than experiments. I am no art historian, but from the little I know about twentieth century abstraction, I am pretty sure this is not true. But even if it were, I would wish it wasn’t. The power of abstraction lies not in what it is, but in what it may be – the power it yields is not one of iteration but of continuous reconfiguration.
Christoph Schellberg’s major achievement in this exhibition is to return this sense of experimentation to the canon of abstract art. Drawing out white zones on organically colored paper, outlining forms in all shapes, sometimes thick, other times fragile, now resonating with the paper qualities, then contrasting with them, tracing the possibilities of three-dimensional shadows without actualising them, keeping the tension between the two and three-dimensional virtual, he revives abstraction not by cutting the already dead body of the tradition, but by re-envisioning new ways to pull his knife. The exhibition in the White Chapel gallery documented the history of abstraction. Schellberg’s drawings here mark its future – not any one future in particular, but the possibility of many futures, all to be found, all to be discovered, if you just look close enough.
Timotheus Vermeulen