ORIANE DURAND: ON NORBERT WITZGALL’S RECENT SHOW “VERONICA” AT DEWEER GALLERY
Always present but constantly changing, shifting over the course of times and years, continuously providing information about the “support”. Nothing about a person is as expressive, lively and fascinating and yet, or perhaps therefore, as truly incomprehensible and elusive as the human face. It is the distinguishing feature par excellence, the visible sign of lived life, individual and unmistakable on the one hand, it is constantly subject to changes and transformations on the other. “The face remains the same over the course of one’s life, but it no longer IS the same,” writes the German art historian Hans Belting in his book Faces that was published last year.What can painting convey about a face? Does it reveal something about the identity, the emotions or the soul of the depicted person? Or does it point to the social codes of the ideal of beauty? Norbert Witzgall has chosen the portrait as the primary motif of his painting. Bygone Hollywood stars, reproductions of old masterpieces and friends appear in his works. In his exhibition “Veronica” there are furthermore underpaintings by Van Dyck or Reynolds and pictures that are based on X-ray images of historical canvases. Some of these works were moreover realized in collaboration with Mathilde ter Heijne—the Dutch video and installation artist who was born in 1969 and now lives in Berlin. In this case Witzgall’s painting serves as a projection surface for ter Heijne’s digital images. During a trip to Togo and Benin, Mathilde ter Heijne took documentary photographs with an aura camera that reacts to magnetic fields, moisture and temperature. In this way subjective and scientific forms of pictorial production overlap and merge.
Witzgall’s portraits often convey a flair of glamour, combined with a touch of melancholy. Painted realistically or surrealistically, they are imbued with a disturbing beauty, sometimes classic, at other time baroque, and occasionally they can flirt with a sense of kitsch. In any case Witzgall always employs the same procedure. He paints after illustrations and photographs; the X-ray images are naturally also among them, they show the concealed here, the painting behind the painting, and perhaps also what is located “behind” the glamour. Because of the similarity of the original—be it a painting “copied” from a photograph or the depicted person—the portraits possess a documentary character and this consequently references reality. The problematic of reality that was always central to portrait painting represents a crucial question for Witzgall, especially in this exhibition. Alone the title “Veronica” points to this fact. Apart from being the name of very different women, it also refers to the VERA ICON, “the true image,” the impression of Christ’s face represented on the veil of Veronica—etymology brings her name together with the Latin meaning. Like a photograph this impression presents a “true image” and it is even seen by the history of photography as one of the proto-photographs. But what is a true image? A picture that shows the truth, reality, a picture that conveys a sense of life or manages to fix an ephemeral moment on its surface? Whether as a photograph or as a painting, there is perhaps no better motif then that of the portrait or of the face to represent the ambivalence of this notion. The face is not just simply a face; it can feint, express something other than what one is thinking. The face can be a mask, in the narrower sense as a real mask but also in the societal sense as a “facial mask” that is trained and shown outwardly. It expresses identity and is the most powerful means of human expression. But in our media-oriented society in particular, faces can conversely also be manipulated with the help of Photoshop or in reality by means of plastic surgery in order to perfectly conform to an ideal of beauty or an idol, in order to conceal the passage of time. Like painting, it can create an illusion; the medium and the motif can consequently be both truth and disguise.
Witzgall’s X-ray paintings of historical canvases are, in my opinion, a perfect representation of this ambivalence. Thematically, X-ray images make the invisible visible; his paintings consequently depict a true picture of a picture. Painted with a black-and-white shading that allows contrats, and with such recognizable elements as wood, nails, canvas surface and reworked faces, the paintings look in actual fact like X-ray images of a canvas. And yet one has been deceived. The painting plays with the X-ray image as such on the one hand, as if the canvas had served as an imprint surface for the X-ray picture. On the other hand it plays with the idea that the depicted picture could be an X-ray image of the “support” itself: Behind the canvas we see, it really could look like that, because a canvas on a stretcher hangs just before us.
The third stage of the disguise takes place in the depiction of liveliness: in works where faces are visible, panic, fear or redemption, i.e. emotions, are recognizable in the eyes of the figures, and in works where only the canvas and stretchers appears, the portrayed object—and one can truly speak of a portrait of the canvas here—possesses an illusory corporality through the analogy of the wood and nails with defective bones that are held together with nails. Witzgall consequently takes his portraits over and above the documentary to the level of psychological occurrences, which he also intends in the other works using different styles and painting techniques, degrees of accuracy and shifts in proportion as well as in perspective and color. The figures, and even more so the floating faces that in many of his works are detached from their bodies, stand in a semi-real, semi-surreal dimension between icon-like presence and the moment of their disappearance. The paradox that both life and death can be sensed in many of the paintings demonstrates Witzgall’s will and consciousness to point out the illusion of the medium and the genre of portraiture. Aside for the visible characteristics of the medium such as the brushstroke, the color, the irregular contours and the structure of the surface, the artist hold this “Memento Mori,” this remembrance of death, like a suspended veil or a floating filter over the paintings: A filter that is subtle reminder, to us as viewers, that what we see is a magical object.
Norbert Witzgall’s painting express hence simultaneously both object and surface, reality and illusion, and life and death; for me, a flagrant collision that unfolds before our own eyes through a permanently sputtering reactor.