dressed to kill
andreas bee
Dressed to Kill
Dressed to Kill, 2000 210 x 180 cm, oil on canvas
At a cursory glance, the paintings of Jochen Twelker may appear to lack any figurative allusions whatsoever. It is not uncommon, when encountering them for the first time to feel that they are atmospheric paintings experimenting with a certain timbre, a vigorous interplay of harmonies and contrasts featuring various instruments and in different pitches. And indeed these finely balanced compositions would surely suffice in this highly nuanced interaction of color sequences, were it not for something which always disturbs the evenly pulsating rhythm, unsettling the viewer. Sooner or later, having reveled in the harmony created by the chords of color, the drift of our eyes across the canvas is interrupted, we experience visual irritation, and feel drawn above all to those sections of the picture which run counter to the harmonious sequence of the whole. In the same way that a single error in the weave of an exquisite piece of cloth can suffice to entangle the eyes in irritations and divert your attention away from the artistic rapport of the fabric, after closer inspection what was initially a seemingly wide spectrum of possibilities becomes limited to a highly specific substantive approach. Suddenly a line is not simply a line in its own right, and a curve no longer simply a curve. Suddenly what previously seemed to be a two-dimensional color structure opens up to incorporate the dimension of illusion, and the pattern which a moment ago appeared to be two-dimensional, arches up to form the image of a body.
Soft Calimity
Soft Calimity, 1997 200 x 180, oil on canvas
Soft Calamity, for instance, features a compact sequence of horizontal stripes of color which directly challenge the eyes' attempt to create order. First, the eye distinguishes between the light upper section and the darker lower part of the picture. In the lighter part of the painting, two blue and two red stripes divide the area of color sequences into equal segments. From the middle downwards the light shades become much darker, only to lighten slightly in the lower third of the painting. Within the two main sections which are fused through the use of related scales of color, various groups of three based on a recurring scheme can be discerned. It is not unusual for a specific thread of color to dominate in them, not unlike a rushing river which stands out in its surrounding land-scape. The strip running parallel to such a dominant course of color is perceived as an auxiliary, supporting component. Yet if your gaze returns from such detailed observations to view the whole again, what you just believed you had seen is challenged anew and you resume your attempt to grasp more precisely the swelling and ebbing of colors.
Josef Albers would derive great pleasure from this game. No one has attempted to impose discipline on the relativity of our color perception as strongly as he did. Equally, it was Albers who was obliged to accept that our eyes always react in a new and unprepared manner to each new combinations of colors. Regardless of how disappointing this may seem to a systematist, it is doubtless one of the most significant findings of Albers' fundamental and highly instructive investigations into the general interaction of colors.
But what is the purpose behind Soft Calamity? An attempt to locate the painting in the tradition of Josef Albers' "Interaction of Color", and to provide a generalizing interpretation of the carefully devised interplay of colors, the sophisticated nature of the intervals, the problem of borderlines between colors, their interpenetration and innumerable variations does not really offer a satisfying answer. If one work is not sufficient to clarify the artist's creative intention, usually the commentator moves on to examine a further work by the same artist. Indeed, if you opt to scrutinize a series of Twelker's paintings, you will be struck by that fact that in each the sequence within the overall pattern is broken at some point or other - like the waves emitted by a depth-sounder meeting resistance. In the painting The Big Sister for example, vertical structures close to the right and left side of the painting respectively clearly interrupt the system of horizontal color sequences. Like the faults created in the evenly structured earth's crust by strong subterranean currents, the texture of the surface is shattered at these points. And it is these very folds, constrictions and tectonic shifts interrupting the course of the colors which enable you to decode the whole and link it back to your own experience of perception. Reinforced by the swelling and ebbing of the lit and darkened sections, the plastic form of a woman's upper torso becomes discernible in unusually strong close-up within the bands of color. In Soft Calamity, a breast is suggested solely by the subtly curving horizontal stripes, together with the modulation of light. A comparison with other works reveals the movements swelling upwards towards the edges of the painting and suggests the plastic extension of a body in space.
Once the observer has learnt to read these signs, Twelker's work is always more than a modest excursion into the world of colors. Perhaps it mimics fashionable striped designs seen on thin pullovers, stripes which in their colorfulness hark back to the fashion of the early 1970s, to a world of imagination shaped by Op Art and flowerpower. In the same way that the fashion revivals of today take up past ideas in a light, playful way, varying them and simultaneously breaking with them, fully aware of their historical status, Twelker's paintings assert themselves thanks to their strange mixture of serious passion and sensuous-erotic humor alongside artistic forerunners of Op Art and post-War constructivism, as represented by artists such as Victor Vasarely and Günter Fruhtrunk. Whilst the one gradually lost himself in fashionable postures and a folkloristic style, the other persisted in his belief in a receptive society and adhered to an overly strict assessment, becoming the highly-respected but sole representative of an intellectual trend which had no followers. Twelker does not fall victim to either of these extremes. He remains extremely flexible and constantly reviews the course he steers between the crushing impact of a Scylla or Charybdis. And if appearances are anything to go by it would seem as if this approach suits him down to the ground. Sometimes it would appear as if he is seeking to challenge his neighbors and the well-knownadherents of respected positions. For some of his paintings seem provocatingly close to this or that camp, but just prior to fully fitting in execute a cheeky if dexterous movement, turn on their own heel and refute all categorization. Twelker profits equally from Abstract Expressionism and concrete painting, defining his own territory in unoccupied no-man's-land between the established positions marked by art history.
Thelma und Louise
Thelma und Louise, 1998 200 x 210 cm / 194 x 210 cm oil on canvas
The titles Twelker gives to his works are as inseparable from them as are the poetic names which feature in Paul Klee's work. Whilst the observer could locate Soft Calamity orThe Big Sister (a counter part to Raymond Chandler´s The Little Sisterwhich is actually the watercolour study to the painting) in a profane world of experience, Thelma and Louise are qua titles, notions, and paintings much more open to associations and interpretational speculations. Naturally each work can be seen and understood in its own right, but when combined, the names call to mind a popular movie dating from 19911. In a combination of road movie, action movie and thriller, the two women Thelma and Louise, both of them hungry for a full life, reverse the traditional behavioral patterns: Previously weak females, the two become increasingly stronger the more they adopt male modes of behavior. If we compare the title with other names Twelker has given his paintings, such as The Secret Agent, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and Tatort (- „crime scene“ – a German TV detective series), it becomes clear that Twelker is evidently able to gain stimulating aspects from the narrative, from the gripping suspense movie. And in the same way that a movie or novel from this genre is only successful if the author is able to maintain the element of suspense from the first moment to the last, a painting can only be described as successful if it does not square exactly with a special idea or trick, does not have a solution explaining it down to the last detail. To achieve this, it must be simultaneously specific and open, clear and mysterious. After all, it is the successful balancing act of content, form and color which constitutes the plausibility of a work of art.
Johannes Itten, whose oeuvre and thought has invariably influenced to a lesser or greater extent any recent reflection on color, was not alone in his day in maintaining that certain shapes and even certain characters could be assigned a special color harmony. Numerous experiments in the 1920s and 1930s by Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Paul Klee and others testify to similar convictions. Likewise, the synaesthetic experience of sound and color was an area of perception much researched during those years. Any viewer influenced by this tradition (which has since fallen into oblivion somewhat) with its close connection between color, form and reality, might be tempted on viewing the proportion of colors and their arrangement on the surface to believe that in addition to everything else, he was looking at the psychogram of an optimistic yet nevertheless ironic artist. Naturally, such interpretations should be viewed skeptically, and in the end they do not emerge as really sound, but - and this is what makes them so valuable - they are by all means stimulating, lending themselves to challenging ingrained habits of seeing and firing the imagination.
In terms of physical reality, Thelma and Louise are more fleeting than actually present. The viewer may think briefly that he has recognized a specific form, but then it eludes him again, in the manner of a picture puzzle. Mostly, our view is like that through a window into an undefined, brightly pulsating cosmos full of floating colored particles. Like protozoons, they occupy space, disappear behind the harsh borders of the painting, revolve, fall into the depth, seem to breathe, flicker and oscillate in their borders, whilst expressing varying moods or temperatures through their hues. As such, Thelma and Louise are everywhere and nowhere. Above all - and this corresponds to their fate - they are constantly in flux and therefore cannot be pinned down to an obvious, clear identity.
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
The Whosis Kid, 1996 280 x 220 cm, oil on canvas
Similarly, as a person the figure inDead Men Don't Wear Plaid eludes us. The extreme resolution of the picture into squares is reminiscent of the digital equivalent used for a computer screen. Both the surface and the body elaborated within it are composed of the same modular form. It is the distortion and concentration of the pattern which enables a distinction between body and surroundings. This strange interwoven state is more intense around the head, where a two-dimensional pattern of squares is superimposed over the head in an attempt to prevent anyone from identifying the person. Whereas such a distortion makes sense when the police release a photo in relation to a crime (in order to uphold the law on personal privacy), in the case of the Twelker painting is serves to provide a (welcome) excuse for the detailed perfection of the technique used in this complex image. Once again, this is an example of the free artistic perceived reality, and here, too, Twelker not only brings to bear the full potential of the given, but also the option of inventing a picture. In tracing this ambivalent process of creation, you may suddenly find yourself studying colored patterned shirts, blouses, pullovers and the bodies that lend them form, then dividing them into useful and not so useful pictorial ideas. The photograph on the cover of this catalog, for example, shows a young woman with a work of art by Franz Erhard Walther - pointing to the inspiration present in everyday things provided we are receptive to them. Once as a viewer you immerse yourself in this interaction of image and reality, you discover beauty and meaning in the trivial, find yourself in a world through the looking glass, where, for you as for the artist, much freezes into form and much form jells into contents.
Twelker's interest in the transition between figuration and abstraction might suggest an intellectual affinity with Paul Klee. The latter's most convincing works emerged in the gray area between abstractions of subject matter taken from the visible world and works devoid of all figuration formed using purely artistic means. A natural phenomenon might inspire Klee to create an abstract painting; yet likewise he would happily link a work of an abstract nature with experiences of reality. Comparable to the famous paintings featuring squares created by Klee, the Bauhaus master craftsman, between 1918 and 1925, inDead Men Don't Wear Plaid, Twelker generates formal tension by contrasting light and darker squares within a medium-toned background.
It is difficult to convey the effect of Twelker's paintings using words. In the end, the best option is to approach the works as one would music, namely with both the senses and the intellect. It is hardly surprising that we repeatedly resort to this comparison when describing paintings. After all, in music and painting we encounter pre-defined regularities, logic and magic. Music cannot be comprehended as a static system. And similarly, it might be useful to imagine the system of colors as a concept of movement. The "canon of colored tonality" was comprehensible for Klee only in terms of his notion of color swelling up and ebbing. "Every color originates out of nothing..., begins very softly then swells to its peak (crescendo), only to slowly die away to its nothing once more (diminuendo).... The voices come in behind as if singing a canon."2 Similarly, in Twelker's paintings the use of colors is to be seen as a movement from loud to quiet, from light to dark, from warm to cold; in short: as a deliberate interaction of forms and colors in space.
1 Thelma & Louise, USA 1991, D.: Ridley Scott,
A.: Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, Brad Pitt, Harvey Keitel, 129 min,
2 Paul Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, Basel and Stuttgart 1981, S. 489
3 Peter Høeg, Tales of the Night , Hamburg 1997
Translation: Jeremy Gaines & Lesley Booth
Dressed to Kill
Text von Andreas Bee