Painting Spaces

Looking back over more than two decades in which Pia Fries has intensely explored the possibilities of the picture, we find an œuvre informed by an extraordinary creative logic. It is extraordinary, among other things, in view of the fact that Pia Fries does not pursue any conceptual approach in her pictures, but has always engaged fully with the visual process of painting and its key aspects of colour and space. Even though there are considerably fewer theoretical writings on this painterly approach than there are on the more analytically conceptual positions in the academic tradition of European painting, this does not mean that they are unreflected. On the contrary: the question of what constitutes a picture, or more precisely, a painting, is constantly renegotiated in the works themselves. Fathoming the conditions and possibilities of non-figurative painting, rendering the compositional process visible and allowing the viewer to see clearly how a picture emerges through painting; herein lies the primum mobile of a compositional attitude that accepts the impossibility of completion, without necessarily indulging in pathos. Rather, because of the artistic issues that emerge in the course of the creative process, each picture spawns still more new pictures. One painting responds to the next and, so, over the years, a series of pictures has been produced whose many voices speak a distinct and varied visual language.

Colour has always been the starting point of Pia Fries’ painting. In her works of the early 1990s, she covered the entire canvas in thick layers of paint in which the different coloured masses of oils jostled together, emphasising their physical materiality. At times, the paints merge and meld, or overlap, forming a variety of surface structures from a sumptuously smooth finish to a dry brittleness that flakes away in places to reveal the layers of paint below. In the relief-like surface of these pictures, spatial depth takes on a visually palpable tactility. It is from this spatial depth that the paintings — in spite of their quietly subdued tones of predominantly green and earthy hues — develop the intense potential energy that breaks through into rough and open brushwork in places. Colour accents, such as the subtle chord of turquoise, bordeaux and yellow in the 1991 painting reute (p. 27), heightened still further by the juxtaposition of deep black, underpin this effect without generating illusionistic effects. In these paintings, the colour does not refer to something beyond itself, but confronts the viewer with its immediate physical presence in the form of paint. And yet, as Max Wechsler has pointed out, the broader connotations of these early works lie in their associations with nature. The references to nature as a creative force, as natura naturans, do not result from any representational portrayal, but from the fact that the pictures themselves are so deeply rooted in the material that they almost appear as a natural aspect of earthy reality.¹ Though clearly evident throughout, the brushwork in this painting does not come across as the individual hand of the artist, but goes beyond its significance as the visual relict of the painterly process to suggest “the substantive embodiment of the image in the paint”.² In this way, it refers to an interior space within the picture that is withheld from the searching gaze of the viewer, thwarting painting’s promise of making things visible.

In the 1990s, this all-over layering of paint,in which all the compositional elements are brought together in a dense synthesis, gives way to a more distinct differentiation between figure and ground, with a brighter palette and an increasing tendency to use pure, unmixed colours. By the mid-1990s, this process has advanced to the point where the white chalk ground of the pictures remains visible, and the different colour figures converge on it to form a complex array of islands. Because individual areas of concentrated colour border the edge of the picture, with the horizontals and verticals emphasised here and there by painterly markings, the format is tangible as an orthogonal system of reference.
For instance, in dizött (p. 65) this forms a compelling contrast to the interrelated accumulations of colour in which the material density of the paint can take on dynamic or even chaotic, directionless traits.

What is striking about these paintings is that they have no centrally focused hierarchy.³ Although the different agglomerations of colour often circle around the centre of the picture, the centre itself remains empty. This means that unexpected centrifugal forces can be generated within the picture, whereby the artist seems to explore, time and again, the critical boundary at which the individual visual elements converge to form one pictorial entity, beyond which the picture would disintegrate into its individual component parts. Whereas the early paintings developed their dynamism out of the depth of the material body of the paint, the expansive dynamic structure of these works relates to the planarity of the white-primed wooden carrier. The multi-part works which then began to appear in the œuvre of Pia Fries, starting with quinto (pp. 43– 45), reflect this expansive aspect of colour. It seems that each picture can, fundamentally, be continued beyond the edges of the painting. The visual elements in these multi-part works are rhythmically linked by analogies of colour and form according to the principle of paratactical order, without blurring the breaks between the individual elements.

From the mid-1990s onwards, the white ground forms a neutral surface, providing a stage on which the colours can be played out in any configuration. Paint has a protean capacity to appear in many forms and guises. All manner of instruments from classic paintbrushes to palette knives and even icing-bags and rollers are used to shape and form the paint — from opaque liquefaction to pastose thickness, all the while retaining legible traces of the compositional process, but without any reference to the artist as author of the configurations. The reason for this is that deliberate markings are repeatedly correlated with contingent traces of the painterly process, such as the splashes and runs of dizött (p. 65), so that they overlap and merge. In this way, the paint itself takes on a strangely dual character in the works of Pia Fries. The facticity of paint as material contrasts with the intentionality of composition aimed at creating a specific look. The “event character” of so many of Pia Fries’ paintings owes much to this dialectical factor that blurs the boundary between the aleatory and the consciously deliberate.
Whereas the white ground of the works created in the late 1990s is, on the one hand, a kind of tabula rasa on which anything seems possible, on the other hand it forms the absolute and impenetrable boundary of these paintings. Instead of the painting opening a window onto imaginary spatial depths, the wooden panel and the colours on it actually thrust themselves into the space of the viewer. Thus, the picture does not make the ground of the carrier disappear. As an impenetrable boundary of the visible, the white ground of the picture ineluctably raises the question of what is concealed behind it. This occurs especially where areas of thickly applied paint have been gouged with a palette knife, revealing the chalky ground, as in gantrisch or faradün (pp. 95, 96).

In 2001, Pia Fries radically called this boundary into question in her painting marott (p. 72), begun in 1997 and reworked in 2001, by cutting a circular hole into the carrier, thereby making the body of the picture a tangible, hollow form. With this revelatory action, the white ground’s potential to become an imaginary pictorial space in which colours are brought to the fore in many different ways is negated on the one hand, while on the other hand emerging all the more clearly because of the contrast this creates. It is above all the increasing use of repetitive patterns of thinly rollered-on paint aimed at transparency that emphasise an illusory, unreal essence. In the patterns created in this way the white ground of the painting becomes an important aspect of the composition. It loses its place as a neutral point of reference in the colour configurations and becomes an element of form that gains increasing autonomy in her subsequent works.

In caspian (p. 121) the pictorial space expands and undulates. The luminous blue with its changing hues redolent of water lends the pictorial space an unfathomable depth. The strongly diluted blue pigments have clearly been poured into the centre of the picture and have accumulated in certain areas of greater surface tension, concentrating there as they dried to create the effect of watercolour painting. Partly because of their plasticity, the colour configurations that appear like islands among the blue seem to float before the intangible blueness, at times merging and integrating with the blue surface.
The increased interest in the ground as an active compositional element in the painting, by which the colour is tendentially integrated into an imaginary pictorial space, thereby becoming an active participant in its constitution, goes hand in hand with Pia Fries’ exploration of the potential of silkscreen in her work since the year 2000. This introduces a new theme into the œuvre of the artist which is nevertheless closely integrated with the question as to the status of the pictorial space and the dual character of paint both as a material and as colour. The very first silkscreen images of ear and conch, used by Pia Fries in her diptychs of 2000, refer back to her early paintings in which the image was manifested as an opaque entity. Closely related in form, both these motifs emphasise the interior of a body of which only the outside is visible, with an aperture leading inwards. In the silkscreen print the motifs are rendered completely flat. This creates a polarity between the corporeality of the object and the planarity of its portrayal. Even though the motifs that are imaged are further alienated by changing their colour and at times by covering them thickly with paint, they nevertheless develop an enormously illusionistic effect. For instance, the ear photographed parallel to the picture plane in Untitled (m/m + m/m) (p. 111) seems to rip a hole into the ground of the picture; at the very least it draws our gaze into the depths, giving the illusion of opening up the white ground. At the same time, the context within the picture lends an abstract quality to the figurative motifs relating to the photographed objects, thereby releasing them from their exclusively referential function. Like the painterly gestures of the artist, they become autonomous entities in their own right.

This tendency to treat painting and reproduction on equal terms is taken one step further in her subsequent works: instead of silkscreening photographs of found objects into the picture, the artist uses screenprinted photographs of paint formations that show the sculptural traces of the painterly process, thereby referring to the material of painting itself. In caspian (p. 121) the modelled and ruptured mass of paint crops up four times in the picture in the form of a different-coloured screenprint, turned around several times and even inverted, so that it is not immediately obvious that this is in fact the same motif. All this becomes more complex still when one realises that even the modelled paint mirrors itself. The paint has apparently been placed on a mirror and photographed from the side so that the mirror axis can be seen in the photograph used for the screenprint. This is significant, because it is only through this mirroring that the motif is transformed from an image of a mere clump of paint into an autonomous entity, for it is the corresponding mirror image that lends it an inherently self-referential form.

By cutting the threads of reference, the mirror image underlines the autonomy of the image of the paint in the works of Pia Fries. Yet at the same time, this once again raises the question of the pictorial space, for on the one hand, the mirror axis introduces a further spatial constituent into the painting, while, on the other hand, the real substance of the paint in the painting is set against the flat, illusionistic pictorial space of the screenprint. Remarkably, the slightly enlarged, illusionistic images of paint can thus seem more familiar than the actual applications of real paint on a white-primed wooden panel. This is probably mainly due to the fact that the process of photographic reproduction presents a familiar visual pattern. Here, we are clearly reminded of how fundamentally established visual conventions not only guide our perception, but even influence what we consider to be true or at least probable.

In her 2003 cycle of paintings Les Aquarelles de Léningrad, which take facsimile prints of watercolours by Maria Sybilla Merian (1647 – 1717) as the starting point for her painterly intervention, Pia Fries further explores the crucial question of the mimetic potential of painting that was flagged up by the screenprints. With a highly virtuoso handling of colour, Pia Fries enters into a dialogue with this painstakingly precise natural scientist and illustrator of botany and zoology. The abstract paintings, whose colours and structures respond to Merian’s watercolours, translate Merian’s mimetic images into Pia Fries’ own visual language and vie with the sumptuous watercolours. They highlight the mimetic potential of painting without leaving the realms of abstraction. Although even the early paintings by Pia Fries often give a vaguely figurative impression in places, the evocative power of her abstract painting has been taken to new heights since her involvement with the work of Maria Sybilla Merian. It is the context of the picture that determines how individual parts of the painting are to be read, and places them in an abstract setting.⁴ This paradoxical inversion once again raises the question of the relationship between autonomy and referentiality.

The palimpseste cycle (p. 155), begun in 2005, appears to be a synthesis of what the artist has achieved so far. In it, she silkscreens one of her own paintings from the Merian series into the new picture, where it is overlayered and surrounded by painterly gestures. These works clearly indicate that the mimetic potential of painting can no longer be separated from the question of the status of the reproduction. Whereas reproductions are conventionally aimed at visual clarity and thus concentrate entirely on the thing portrayed, they take on a selfreferential function in the palimpseste series. They no longer open up the ground of the painting in an illusionistic way in order to present something deceptively realistic, but lead instead into an endless regression. Thus, it is clear that the individual painting in the œuvre of Pia Fries is also invariably rooted in the diversity of different painterly possibilities explored in the paintings she has already produced. Similarly, the trace and the imprint appear as compositional processes that bear within them all the former states of the painting and the process of its production. They are neither exclusively a sign nor a thing, but oscillate between both possibilities.⁵ In this context, the pictorial space is no longer unequivocal. Its relationship to the actual image as object and body has to be defined anew in each painting. Thus, spatial logic can be inverted in one and the same painting, tipping from one modality into another. The many and varied inversions of figure and ground, the contrasts, overlaps, rotations and visual tilting effects, all lend the paintings a dynamic quality with no unequivocal direction. Since this means that there is no unequivocal way of reading these pictures, they constantly refer back to themselves.