» Unter der Platane «
Notes on the recent paintings of Katharina Prantl
L'OBJET, C'EST LA POETIQUE*
Le rapport de l'homme à l'objet n'est du tout
seulement de possession ou d'usage.
Non, ce serait trop simple. C'est bien pire.
Les objets sont en dehors de l'âme, bien sûr;
Pourtant, ils sont aussi notre plomb dans la
tête. Il s'agit d'un rapport à l'accusatif.
L'homme est un drôle de corps, qui n'a pas
son centre de gravité en lui-même.
Notre âme est transitive. Il lui faut un objet,
qui l'affecte, comme son complétement direct,
aussitôt. Il s'agit du rapport la plus grave
(non du tout de l'avoir, mais de l'être).
L'artiste, plus que tout autre homme, en
reçoit la charge, accuse le coup.
Francis Ponge
*L'expression est de Braque
In front of the Prater studio in Vienna there are several large plane
trees. Below one of them, closer to the studio's veranda, there is the
spot where the conversation with the stones took place for a generation,
where the stones were made to crack to give up their innermost secrets
under the hands and the eyes of Karl Prantl. There, facing this place
on the terrace, these paintings were born. Here, in the Prater studio,
in the shadows of so many curved stones, much has grown over time.
Disproving the adage that says that under a large tree nothing much
will grow. On the contrary, seldom has so much been cultivated
under the shadow of one tree.
What then is this conversation with the materials? Why is it that we
are again and again transfixed by such dialogues with what, prima
facie, appears to be mute material?
»The relation of man to object is by no means only one of possession
or usage. No, that would be too simple. It's much worse.
Objects are outside of feeling, of course; however, they are also
the leadweight in our head. It's a question of a relation to the accusative.«
And a little further, Francis Ponge in a poem »The Object is the
Poetics« using Braques's phrase, he says:
»Man is a queer sort of body, who has no center of gravity in himself.
Our feeling is transitive. It needs an object, which affects it, as
its direct complement, at once. It is a question of the gravest relation
(not at all of having, but of being). The artist, more than anyone else,
bears the brunt of it, acknowledges the blow.«
The physiology of these paintings resides above all in their
transparent colors and in the ways in which the color finds itself
transported and guided, often by its own force of gravity on the
canvas. Like stretches of film, thin colors appear and disappear only
to appear again, open seams in the mine of a colored crystal.
Their entire existence, their raison d'etre consists in being
transmuted from their inorganic, mineral version of their origin and
then converted into a liquid version, before drying up again and
solidifiyingas the map of an unknown, as yet undiscovered land,
future trace of even greater distance, a further future of experiences
and memories. Patiently thrown waves of water and color, earth powder
and water, assembled in ever-renewed configurations. As if creating
minitatures of the constellations in heaven and the magnetic fields on
earth, an echo of things, of der ding an sich.
The waxing and vaining of the moon as much as our turns around
the sun are caught in their orbit. This is why the particularity of each
configuration and its color composition are so important. As if they
are the conditions for what retrospectively will appear, inevitably,
in our experience of the world and ourselves in it. The excess of
vision, the exccess of external form in each and every configuration
finds its equivalent in the material treatment, in its unique rendezvous
with the angel of light, each day and each moment during the day and
the night of our lives. Never to appear the same again, informe,
these figures nonetheless sustain a kind of endless repetition.
They create and mold the matrix of our hours, our moments on earth.
Were we only a body, there would be no doubt that we would be in
balance with nature. But feeling is on our side of the balance too.
Heavy or light, we cannot say. Much of what we feel enters as weight,
light and dark, and often through color. We are held captive by the
dying red color of the pomegranates, the indigo, and the purpule
from the depth of the sea and the olive green. Blue marble from Brazil
and red stone from Armenia are never far from us.
As if we need a counterweight. Of course they are subjective objects,
of course we embrace our own emanations, our phantoms. But that is
enough to reassure us, to offer us a point of mooring, they are the
shore on which we can rest our own weight. It offers the vital
connection between the hand that touches and lead the pigments into
the water and out again on the canvas and the eye that could remain
closed at the moment of arrival. As we have to choose each and every
day of our life again, the objects that will act as counterpoints of
our desires. There are never merely the frame or background in our
life, but the means by which our daily bread, wine and dance becomes
possible. We are living according to the attraction by which we are
held together within our relation to the center as pure gravity. This
force perhaps best expressed in one of Rilke's last poem:
Center, how you draw yourself
Out of all things, regaining yourself
Even from things in flight: Center, strongest of all!
Standing man: like a drink through thirst,
Gravity plunges through him.
But from low-lying cloud,
A rich rain of weight.
»Schwerkraft« Rainer Maria Rilke
The »unheard-of center« Rilke calls it in the Sonnet to Orpheus,
II,28. It is the ground, which make the play of being possible.
As beings that hazard themselves, we are given over to experience
our counterparts.
Each and every painting throw in the balance, as the throw of dice,
the play brings into movement, it release us into a risk. The result
hangs in a balance; it retains the venture, which makes all things
live. This release, flinging ourselves loose, we become aware of our
own mortality. The mystery of pain and love are never leamed. Like
Perseus' shield, we are dependent on these indirect reflections and
touches in which we leam to recognise the cloud's upheaval, which
is our life.
These aquatic paintings are the paintings of watercolor made of water
mixed with pigments. They present us with a place where we will
no longer be able distinguish between outer views and the inner
landscape. We perhaps never could clearly draw apart that which is,
in anyevent, subject to the same imaginary proccess, and which for this
reaon leads us to belive that something is there rather than nothing.
We are mortal and this is our language. Indeed, more than earth, air
and fire, water is caught in a cunning battie against gravity. Not only
Aphrodite emerged from the sea, even she does not dweil there,
but from the cleansing effect of the Flood to the Moses pulled out of
the Nile to the cermony ofbaptism to the Egyptian, Greek and Indian
reincarnation journeys wich also took place on subterranean rivers.
Quetzalcoatl, the god of the Aztecs, and Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied
bath in the same spring of invulnerability. There is nothing more moving
than the river bath taken in the Ganges, as in Benares, by the Hindus.
Indian, Oceanic and Japanese midwives immunise their newly born in
rituals involving pouring water over them. Who could forget the 'Jeu
d'eaux' of the Villa d'Este, either in reality or in Franz Liszt's interpretation
in Annees de Pelerinage, the fountains of Tivoli, or Gaston Bachelard's
Psychoanalysis of Water? The endless rain in Tarkovsky's films as well
as his cinematic vision ofwomen's hair, like plants, which, sometimes,
are washed in the water, and sometimes, resembles flows in the river.
But here the cycle of water is much more intense since it is from
water that the stones under the Plane tree came to be, and it is with
water that they were curved, it is with water that the stone was
shaped again. This is the cycle ofwater that gives these paintings
their unending, undulating rhythems. They seems to be far away and
at a moment later they have retumed, only to abandon us again. Their
pulse is informed by the formlessness of water in movement, in space
and time measured by the heart. It makes you aware, in the fullness
of time, of the visible remains, or traces of that which was and is no
longer, perhaps never was, but always is, it gives us not merelya new
landscape but a new eyes.
Prof. Yehuda E. Safran
New York 25. Dec 2007
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