» Les Lumières de la mer « Notes on the recent paintings of Katharina Prantl Ne plus penser ne signifie pas: s'arrêter de penser. La pensée est conscience et inconscient d'univers. Cesser de jouer d'un instrument ne signifie pas, pour un artiste, Ne plus entendre les sonorités de l'œuvre qu'il vient d'interpréter. Le cerveau se substitue à l'oreille. La mémoire se répond a vivre avec chaque notre retrouvée. Edmond Jabes, La Lumières de la mer  Katharina Prantl is inspired by landscapes. She travels widely and imbibes places -- Villa Lante, Venice, Rome, New Mexico -- and this time she has visited the extreme South-West corner of Portugal, a region on the Atlantic Ocean: Ponta De Sagres, 'Rosa dos Ventos". (Rose of the Winds). At times the desert, at times the mountains, this time the sea. The crystal reflections of the sea are her source this time, broken up into smaller bundles of sparks and splinters of ricocheting colours. It takes a painter such as Katharina Prantl to turn these impressions into an internalized vision. She does not merely exhibit an enlightened hedonism to indulge one's thirst in the world of things; instead she displays skill and insight in the pleasure she takes in the abundance of constellations of sense impressions that she turns into an intellectual object of experience. It takes a great deal of intelligence to bring about these transmutations of elements into a single harmonious whole. It is the proper measure that allows the combination, the mixture of colours in proportions. Rare is the experience that offers a finite configuration, a formation, which gives us at same time the possibility to contemplate infinity. Rare is the moment in which we can perceive the many in the one. The painter throws a fragile bridge over the abyss when she reduces the bewildering indefinite variety to a specific colour and tonality, when she has worked out the various relations that enable her to concentrate on the elements that harmonize. This process of discernment at the same time may divide up elements, and continues to do so until one no longer just see light as a single thing with an indefinite number of forms, but also as a medium of the precise forms themselves, assisting our perception of the kinds of forms they take. The indefinite becomes finite; the boundless sensations acquire a limit. Or, as Bergson says, the fountain becomes a fountain at the moment the water begins to fall. In the encounter between consciousness and the world there is the vertiginous moment, a time of dizziness in which one resolves to see in other terms than the given, as in a world taken for granted. The vectors of perception are cut loose from their moorings. We are floating, drifting in a stream of impression crowding the horizon. What Cézanne called la petit sensasion is nothing less than this experience of colour, hue, and >shape in an disjointed position, as if it the object of perception had lost its mooring and is now floating in the vast universe, free to join in new constellations, new transformations other than our expected, predictable, already existing picture of things. Outside the order of things, against that which our common belief maintains, but, nevertheless this fragmented view, with its childlike surprise of discovery is constantly intriguing, as it demands its own privileged position in a possible other scheme of things. With clouds and rings of smoke in her blood (Lorca) the painter is set to create that new universe. The visible entrails, the reverse side of the innocent presence, there we encounter chaos as the primordial stuff, the original overwhelming disorder, and also as the universal womb. Or, as Rothko summed up this predicament 'A painting is not the image of an experience, it is the experience itself'. These paintings offer the relation of life to the rhythm, temporality and emotional intensity of being in a place. We experience her experience like breathing, as a rhythm of intaking and outgivings. Their succession is punctuated and made into rhythm by the Experience of intervals, periods in which one phase is ceasing and the other is inchoate and preparing. Here we confront a block of sensations in the territory; colour, postures and sounds abound in this region. We are engaged in the past and already prefigure the future. Lines cross, rivers meeting, endless bifurcations appear, meanders, sea waves, waves that fly, heat waves and waves of winds. Disintegrations, fragmentations, reconstitutions. Shattered figures, the copulation of shapes, and the conjugations of vistas. A return to vibrations, a plunge into undulations. Repetitions turn paintings into a machine of infinity. Heterogeneity, a continuous eruption of fragments of colours, particles, shards. Nothing is fixed. Avalanches of cascading diagonals, countless strokes, proliferations of intersecting shafts of light. Is there no centre? To return to the unity of the vision is to reconcile body, soul, and the world. A centre at once completely empty and completely full, a total void and a total plentitude. The distance between the object and the conscience that contemplates it - melts away in the face of the overwhelming presence, the only thing that really exists. The painter sees his inner space in this outer space. The shift from the inside to the outside - an outside that is interiority itself, the heart of reality. An ineffable spectacle, we leave our life behind to catch a glimpse of life. Paintings in the round show variety of lines radiating from the centre out, as if they are traces of the line the traveller will find incised in the large round tablet flat on the ground which is the Rose of the Winds. One can detect shadows of things known in other instances. An exploration or an encounter? The latter, most probably. A physical encounter with the elements, as with the tempest, lava and fire, with the cataclysm of being, shaken to its very foundation by its inner intimate being, a fragility that is indistinguishable and inseparable from our own selves. An encounter with the known-unknown. Space, which is a pure vibration. A great gift of the gods. Where there is no I; there is space, vibration, perpetual animation. An imperceptible movement that accelerates minute by minute. Wind, a typhoon, a torrent of faces, forms, lines. A dizzying evaporation and condensation. A colourful bubble, more bubbles, pebbles, little stones. Rocky cliffs of air. The ensemble of patches, of colours from deep red to the transparent green and blue provide total transparency, a motionless whirlwind. As charm dissolves space, as the morning steals upon the night, melting the darkness, so the rising senses begin to chase the chaotic impressions. Our understanding begins to swell, and the approaching tide will shortly fill the shore of comprehension that lies confused and opaque. Not one of us who are looking will fail to perceive these canvasses. Invisibly as the spirit of Ariel on Prospero's island, jostled from our senses we know for certain where we were wracked, where we were landed. Katharina Prantl has given us again a new vision of her kingdom, a compass for yet another wonder, Or as Miranda said in The Tempest: O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't'! Prof. Yehuda E. Safran Columbia University, New York 2. May 2006 « zurück