Pictures within Pictures

I.

Whoever has had the rare opportunity to observe Pia Fries at work in her studio or has been able to watch film sequences of this will view her art differently from that moment onward: this painting, with its complicated, fine structures and elaborated gradations of colors and lines at first appears to be anything but cultivated, refined, and balanced. This is largely due to an almost brutal use of artistic resources, with the material underside of all art. Paint, her main medium, appears here rich and glistening damply in various aggregate states. From a polymorphous mass to a thin, liquidy substance, it is used in combinatory procedures: hurling lumps of paint, stirring at quickly with a rake, squeezing it with a press or spatula, in the banging the entire body of the image on the floor in order to set the tenacious mass of paint in motion in a randomly controlled manner. Cutting the skin of the pigment is a valid procedure, as is scratching off or cutting out thick patches of paint to reveal layers beneath. Without doubt we are confronted here with an artistic practice that even in the working process clearly rejects the modern maxims of purity and uniformity. We seem to find access to her methods rather in the field of surrealistic experiments with the abject and with the exploitation forms of aleatorics. In any case, the path from the physical action, from the “making” to a visible and stable artistic result is a process of many stages with Pia Fries – not only with respect to the concrete case of each individual work, but also in view of the development of her art over the past twenty years. The fact that “everything” is not “possible” here, but rather that consequence certainly becomes visible, may be verified by a look back: back to her artistic beginnings and to the gradual crystallization of a new image form for which Pia Fries is well known today.

The early work of the artist does not follow any linear structure; rather it opens up a “spread” of various fields of interest. With each of her works, Fries sets herself a new task, as it were, and in doing so sounds out all those topics that will appear again in her works, in changed form, during the subsequent twenty years. The passage through the early works has to begin at the end of the 1970s, at the time of her first art studies at the School of Applied Arts, Lucerne. Steinhaus, from 1979 [ fig. 1 ], resembles a preparatory exercise in dual ways of seeing. The work consists of a block of marble, exhibiting two different forms of processing: on the one side, roughly hewn stone emphasizes the character of the material as well as the traces of its working, and its volume suggests the gable end of a house; on the other side, the smooth, square marble surface serves as the medium for the perspective-scratched drawing of a house. The artist was interested here in the dual principles of surface and depth, drawing and volume, line and mass; of rough and smooth, visual and haptic, viewer orientation both fixed and in the round, and illusion and physical presence.

In 1980 Pia Fries moved to the Düsseldorf Academy. The dominance of painters among the professors initially caused the prospective sculptress great uncertainty, a “shaking of the foundations.”¹ Schwimmerin, from 1981 [ fig. 2 ], an acrylic painting on bed sheets in the monumental dimensions of 140 by 200 cm, was her final work in the orientation class. It presents a homogenous white area, with the representation of a perspectivized, strongly aligned female figure with arms reaching out wide. The thin-bodied paint in anti-naturalistic shades of blue for the incarnate parts gives the figure open, bleeding contours. The watercolor-like, fluid medium corresponds to the subject of the female swimmer. But the illusionism of the illustration is broken by the missing context of the figure, its appearance generated by the fusion of two conflicting areas. In the combination of the incompatible– the perspective depth of the painting and the flatness of the sheet – Fries articulates for the first time the figure ground concept, the syntactic basis of all painting. As different as Steinhaus and Schwimmerin may seem, they are linked by their use of a simultaneity of principles pulling the work in opposite directions, therefore suggesting a tendency to dissolve disambiguities toward hybrid visual forms.

In her group of works Vögel, 1982 [ figs. 3 and 4 ], Fries organizes the entire canvas with paint, yet the pictures of hummingbirds and parrots in exotic colors are not naturalistic representations. Rather the the artist seems tangibly interested in a form of painting that, although it does not deny the abstract, does not engage with it in the sense of an artistic reflection. She is not interested in approximating the material appearance of shining feathers or blunt beaks but rather in creating an order that does not allow any conflict between abstraction and reference to reality, one in which, on the contrary, the absence of such a conflict is a precondition. In this case, the significance of Fries’s teacher, Gerhard Richter, to her early orientation must be assumed: the spiritual exercise of the Vögel series was initiated in the first year of her study in the Richter class; the group of works was shown there during the Academy end-of-year show in 1982.

As is well known, Gerhard Richter’s work has unfolded since the 1960s in a number of extensive, clearly articulated series of works. Subjects and modes of representation that would seem to be mutually exclusive are masterfully placed next to one another and contrasted. Exposed contradictions and dissonances determine the intellectual-artistic profile of his large-scale works. Two poles of his creative work can be referred to each other: the realistic photo paintings and the large abstractions that have arisen since the mid-1970s. The color intensive abstract images, saturated in materials, owe much to a painting technique of complex layering in which often extremely contradictory artistic elements are combined with one another. The work with rakes, paintbrushes, and spatulas, in procedures of randomness and control, leads to a colossal dramatization of the image field. Richter’s refusal to develop a definitive style, his insistence on continual change, on dialectical about-turns and productive breaks, created a new conceptual basis for the discourse of painting in the 1970s and 80s, and this would have also been exemplary for Pia Fries. The fact that a work can be monochrome, representational, figurative, abstract, and realistic at the same time, that all conceptual assignments are at the same time relativized by the validity of their opposite, had to count for the students as a justification for the pictorial that could no longer be circumvented.

Richter decisively rejects a semantic interpretation that looks for the meaning of the pictures predominantly in the objects presented; on the other hand, he does not want to see painting reduced self-referentially to the means of its presentation. Such an attitude, which highlights the aporia of modern art, exists only subliminally in Pia Fries’s work, rather than being formulated explicitly. Her group of works Untitled, from 1985 [ figs. 5 and 6 ], nevertheless can be interpreted, since it again takes up the subject voiced in the Vögel series, as a sign of her continuing involvement with the relationship of the object and its rejection. Untitled [ fig. 5 ] shows compact painting textures on the entire picture surface of 110 by 80 cm. The rhythmically fragmented, interwoven paint seems to have no relationship with the figurative motif. But a more thorough observation reveals that the arrangement of the paint did not happen without a figurative cause; the motif – the head of a parrot – exists, hidden in the picture, as it were, and reveals itself only if there is a shift in perception: from focusing on the meaningless individual flecks of paint to the distanced perception of the overall visual field, which allows a context for the motif to emerge from the various parts.

Optical inversions – pendulum swings of perception between surface and object-related seeing – also attracted Fries’s interest in the work Ornament, from 1984 [ fig. 7 ]. Even the title of this fiftyone-part work gives an indication of the field of reference in which the artist locates her investigation: it focuses on the ornamental, the difference between figure or pattern and ground that has become form and represents a “cultural universal.”² The entire spectrum of Modern and Postmodern art has been influenced by the ornamental; it was the catalyst for epochal developments in the field of autonomous and also applied art. This is connected with two developmental trends in Modern art: with the phenomenon of surface or wall as a subject of artistic design, and in dispensing with the object, in place of which came highly formalized, abstract signs. Through the ornamental, the art of the modern – even if this was indirect and encrypted – acquired a new repertoire of forms and a new supra-individual sense of meaning.

In the ornamental as a historically derived, retrospective, methodical resource, the singleminded progression of the avant-garde underwent“its dialectic correction.”³ In this respect, the ornamental was in a position to focus attention on the historical dimension of Modern art. It was this insight alone that enabled the discourses of so-called Postmodernism in the first place. In contrast to the pioneers of Abstract art, the painters of Postmodernism no longer saw any irreconcilable contrast between ornament and abstraction, but rather a fertile dialectic of break and reconciliation.⁴ The historical situation of Postmodernism was reflected in the ornamental structures of art in the 1980s; that is, in this turn against the utopian ideals of Modern art, the ornamental acquired a significance that was both symptomatic and yet critical of time.

In Ornament, Fries developed her specific formulation for the figure ground concept, and in doing so gave a new emphasis to the game with the phenomena of figurative/nonfigurative. Each of the fifty-one drawings shows two stylized birds with heads in the white of the paper shade and black tails curving upward to the top edge of the sheet. The symmetrical position of the sheets results in amphora-shaped spaces in between, which the artist has filled with dense networks of graphite scribbles. These abstract intermediate zones, like the stylized birds, are used like a picture puzzle. You can interpret the spaces between as darkly contoured figures in front of a white paper base or as visual elements arranged next to the birds. A first look at the pictures as a whole, presented by the artist in rows of three on top of one another, gives the impression that an ornamental structure is being created. This, however, is directly contradicted by a comparative viewing of the individual pictures, because, in fact, each of the pictures actually formulates an individual solution, and no picture is the same as any other. Fries’s focus here is obviously more on the moments of irritation and unrest than on the symmetry of a structure that repeats itself. The appropriation of the ornament as a critical, conceptual form or as a methodological potential for renewing painting, as it became a key subject in painting in the 1980s, is hard to discern in Fries’s work. It does without the pretension, typical of the time, of artistically reflecting aspects of the everyday and media culture in the ornamental or pursuing the reconditioning of historical repertoires of Modernist forms. It seems that Fries is more interested, instead, in intensifying our attention on a genuine artistic experience in which visual domino effects, the changing of data of perception, play a role.

Ornament’s latent rejection of a focused and identifying way of seeing, extending the simultaneous visual tendency, the rhythm, beyond a single picture across the entire wall panel, can also be found in the two following cycles that can be viewed here: Untitled, a seven-part group of works from 1985 [ fig. 8 ], and Untitled, a four-part work from 1985/86 [ fig. 9 ]. Each of these consists of vertically extended, rectangular pictures in oil on canvas, taking up a large wall-panel space. In both works, Fries makes use of a repertoire of biomorphic forms. In the earlier, seven-part work, folkloric motifs and ornaments appear, suggestive of Central American art. A comparison of the two groups of works makes it clear that the biomorphic fantasy forms in the earlier work emanate from one point of origin and are predominantly axisymmetric, whereas the bud and cartilage shaped strand forms of the later work are cut through by the borders of the image field. The accumulation of shapes along the vertical axis, connecting the two works to each other, is, as a method of organizing the image, restricted to just this short phase in Fries’s work.

Pia Fries took up Gerhard Richter’s statement “I can do anything” as a challenge. The pictorial understanding of her teacher, at once both skeptical and self-confident, is also valid in her work. The extensive group of works Untitled with which the budding artist completed her studies in the Richter class in 1986 [ figs. 9 and 10 ] demonstrates her “ I can do anything” attitude as an interplay of formats, picture bases, color combinations, and visual techniques. Only in her selection of motifs does she remain continually committed to the world of plants and animals. In a total of thirty-four tableaux that were presented on two walls of the Academy, she introduced heterogeneity as a stylistic principle into her work. The breadth of variation is considerable: from pastose to thinly glazed layers of pigment, from drawn layers of lines to rough markings buried into the wood with a chisel, from round to rectangular formats, from processing the inside of the picture to the edges. The combinatory use of photographic pictures can be seen here for the first time, through which the principle of collage enters her work. But with respect to form and content, her interpretation of this avant-garde technique does not allow for each picture to potentially take up quarters in another one. Rather the photographs are cut up, thus appearing as placeholders for the motif, whether plant or animal. In this respect they are used as the equivalent of a drawing, which the artist equally uses in numerous cases to represent the object. But this internal change of visual media from painting to photography or drawing does not emerge as the issue; rather, the motifs are integrated into the composition through the type of their implantation. Heterogeneity therefore finds itself implemented in different scales, both in the individual work and as a reference to the entirety of the polymorphous ensemble. There, each picture asserts itself independently, is autonomous and yet stands as an element with respect to the whole. Perhaps this oneness in the multiplicity can be seen as the Fries-specific, very distinctive appropriation of the Richteresque “urge to distract.”⁵

The following works, from the series Kompakte Bilder, which were created after 1988 – for example reute or zelanx, from 1991 [ figs. 12 and 13 ] – go a considerable step further with regard to the unity of the image field. The canvas is now covered completely with pastose paint, and the representational can no longer be detected. There is also no longer any distinction between figure and ground; at most there is a compression of the mass of paint at the center of the image field, applied in a circular motion. Semi-mechanical procedures lead to that characteristic tearing open of the uppermost layer of pigment, making the layers that lie beneath visible. An artistic power and a rhythm can be felt, gesticular impulses that serve not so much to make an individual signature visible as to visually emphasize autochthonous realities. There seem to be parallels with Richter’s aesthetic project in his abstract pictures. American art critic Dave Hickey saw in Richter “the cross that Pia Fries had to bear.”⁶

The balance of Fries’s early spiritual exercises in the field of art is rich. In just ten years, she experimentally sounds out the basic syntactic phenomena of the pictorial and works out the foundations for the specific image form, which is crystallized in her work in the 1990s. She marks off her position here on two sides, which were considered by artists of her generation as probative and feasible options: Fries’s art is neither a conceptually justified paraphrase of the history of modern painting, analyzed with references and critically annotated, nor is it the celebration of pure painting, which at this point reclaims for itself a new immediacy and thus betrays the historic status of the discourse of painting. Her position bears only a partial connection to these two approaches, typical of the time: with the first she shares the idea that the visual discourse is an incomplete process in which she, with others, must work further on the gaps of an(art-)historically specified material; with the second, she shares a confidence in the power of artistic resources, especially of paint, which for her becomes the most important medium in the reformulation of her position. At the same time, however, she refuses to maintain a theoretical safeguard or an existential pathos in her work.

II.

What can be observed in the 1990s is a brightening up of Fries’s palette, the ever more frequent use of unmixed shades, and a relief-like application of the paint substance. Her picture base is no longer the elastic canvas but the wood panel, which is prepared with opaque-white chalk primer (gesso). This change in the picture base is associated with an ever-stronger differentiation between figure and ground. Both are equal players in the visual composition. Refined handling with paintbrushes, dental spatulas, and other, partly self-made instruments allows passages of paint to be created on a shining white background, isolated from one another like islands. Often these islands of paint make contact with the edges of the pictures, or appear to be cut off by these. The image centers, on the other hand, are usually weaker, or even unoccupied. The image border is deliberately not marked by a frame; rather the works should stand “unframed” in front of the white gallery wall. Sert, from 1996 [ fig. 14 ], is exemplary of a larger group of works that are set up with no hierarchy, even if the sure feeling of the artist for inner references informs each of these panels. Fries’s particular talent is a sense of relationship. Formally concise, precisely defined areas alternate in her works with amorphous or weakly defined passages. The soft contrasts with the hard, heavy with light, linear with flat, blunt with shining. A compact palette of garish color values is heightened into loud chords of color. Ruptures and formal dissonances are used selectively to construct moments of tension and surprise effects.

Around the year 2000, Fries enters a phase in which the complexity of her works from the 1990s is again increased and– partly reverting to procedures tested previously – complicates the status of her pictures. The excision of a circular area from the wooden picture base can be understood in this way, as in marott, 1997/2001 [ fig. 15 ].⁷ In an almost discrete manner, Fries, without developing it into an identifying mark of her paintings, opens up the main body of work and lets a moment of depth and ambiguity into her art. The “holy surface” of which Gottfried Boehm spoke, which in Fries’s works, especially since the 1990s, appears as hard, opaque, and impermeable, is here perforated, and thus at points is made pervious. But the more subtle way of negating the opacity of the surface is the manipulation of photographic reproductions. This is because photographs, due to their supposed objectivity and their status as copies, possess the ability to break through the surface with their own image order, and to open up into the depth. And yet Fries implements this movement only slightly.

In the two diptychs of Untitled (e/e+e/e) and (m/m+m/m) made in 2000 [ figs. 16 and 17 ], Fries implanted photographic elements in her pictures for the first time since the 1986 Untitled. A mussel and an ear were included in the picture as colored screenprints. They represent the return of the motif and of the object in the context of the abstract picture. But what degree of reality do these printed elements claim? The photographic motifs are cut out; that is to say, they leave their own visual spatial surroundings once they enter the Friesian picture composition. Both motifs, the mussel and the ear, intervene in an illusionist manner in the image space with their limited physical volumes. In addition, from this point on paint enters the viewer’s space sculpturally and heavy in material. The painting absorbs the photographic images, as it were, thus preventing the effect of illusion. It is not so much a question of the interaction of different picture types on a surface, or the hybrid mixture of the reproduced and free drawing, that stand in the foreground. The viewer here will therefore not so much observe the incompatible – the different degrees of reality of photo screenprint and color relief – but rather marvel at the transformational potential of Pia Fries’s painting.

It is Fries’s intention to entrap the photographic images with the laws of painting. So it is only consistent that in a work like caspian, from 2001/02 [ fig. 18 ], she integrates reproductions of a selfcreated three-dimensional artifact. The artist has modeled an amorphous figure out of a doughlike lump of paint and given it a round opening on the top – an autonomous, three-dimensional form of humps and hollows, not intended to represent anything [ fig. 19 ]. What is revealing is the extent to which she now multiplies the picture layers and combines them with the reproduced elements. Initially, the artist placed the color form on a mirror, in order to duplicate it in this way; it was then duplicated by means of photography, followed by reproduction via a silkscreen process. The distinctive media feature of this three-stage procedure lies in the fact that the sculptural quality of the paint is transformed step by step into plane. In caspian, the amorphous artifact was printed four and six times on to the picture base indifferent shades of color and varying orientations. The artist then countered these placements by applying colored substances that fluctuate between watery-transparent and relief-like opaque. The reproduced images are used by Fries above all to assert the uniqueness of the work, the differentiated surface textures that ultimately cannot be reproduced: we ought to view them in the original, in the here and now. So as an interim assessment, we could conclude that bringing disparate things closer together is the form and content of Pia Fries’s art. We can feel the artist’s awareness of the problem involving the historical challenges of painting and her ambition to approach artistic means from an unconventional and different philosophy. Taking sculpture as her starting point, she sees painting as something that is not directly accessible. Paint is a material that is maltreated in many different ways, and inso doing can also be used like sculptural material. What is duplicated in the form of prints or photographic reproductions in her pictures becomes a “sign of the unique.”⁸ All her refined manipulations are never free from acts of superimposing, of incorporation and disappearance into the structure of the picture. At the same time, the expertise with which Fries builds up new structures, masterfully combines them, and shapes the disparate into an overall tenor is most impressive.

In the group of works loschaug created between 2003 and 2008, the artist worked for the first time with historical graphics, which she included in her pictures as screenprints. Plant etchings by the painter and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647– 1717), from the book Flowers, Butterflies and Insects,⁹ provided the floral models that Fries used on a considerably enlarged scale in several works. In the four-part work schwarze blumen “erucarum ortus,” 2005 [ see pp. 27–30 ], she developed her graphic painting structures on wood panels, the white areas of which are interrupted by wide, unprimed strips. Here, as in the later groups of pictures tisch and bolted, the artist integrates geometrical forms such as printed piles of books or copper etchings, which counteract the biomorphic and organoid placements. In this respect, the cycle merian’s surinam, made from 2003 to 2009, would appear to be particularly revealing [ fig. 20 ]. It refers to the work Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, from 1705, in which Merian published the results of her two-year study trip to the former Dutch South Sea colony of Surinam. For the fourteen picture pairs, Fries used facsimile prints of Merian watercolors. The precision and seductive beauty that distinguish Merian’s precisely detailed representations of caterpillars and butterflies, fruits and blossoms, are transferred into Fries’s image world. The facsimiles function, as it were, as messengers of a past culture of knowledge in which visual perception and artistic skill were still in the service of nature research.

But this is no nostalgic reflection on Fries’s part; rather she distances herself from Merian by tearing up a facsimile print for each of her works and sticking the two parts into her picture separated from each other. The tearing up is a latently aggressive act, comparable with Fries’s brutal ways of processing the paint material. The tear in the paper stands for the split separating then from today; it is supposed to make time visible. The irregular edges of the tear, displaying the traces of this violent act, contrast with the sharply cut edges of the facsimile print. The white paper edges were partially filled by Fries with delicate colored hatching. This represents a bridge between her own work and the appropriated. In addition, ornamental forms are used in isolation as figures in the picture or as conjunctions between the various image elements. The most spectacular element, however, is Fries’s handling of color, which here seems to be more disciplined and less eruptive than in other picture groups of recent years. The Wonderful Transformation of Caterpillars was the title of a publication by Merian; the words can also reference the transformational potential of the painting of Pia Fries, who reacts here indirectly to Merian’s naturalist illustrations: the caterpillar finds its artistic pendant in a caterpillar-like trace of paint, the multi-articulated shell of the crab is reflected in a finely rhythmic marking of pastose paint, etc. Similarities are produced here in a way that is not mimetic. “It is only the context of the picture that decides how individual sections […] are to be interpreted and places them in an abstract connection.”¹⁰ Paint is not the opponent but the collaborator in a metamorphosis of shapes. The artist demonstrates to us in this way that painting is the equivalent of nature.

The term palimpsest, which appears from 2005 in the titles of her works and which is also connected to les aquarelles de léningrad, is symptomatic. As is generally known, palimpsests are historical manuscripts on parchment or papyrus, the words of which have been rubbed out and overwritten many times, whereby the top layer in each case can be read in the chronological order of the scripts. The idea of the palimpsest is therefore a metaphor for the intellectual and creative processes of sinking, elimination, and forgetting, for memory and repetition. In a figurative sense, the term palimpsest has flourished since the 1960s in the literature of structuralists and poststructuralists; according to this concept, palimpsests undermine the idea of the author as the only source of a work. Every text, every work exists solely in the presence of other, already written or created works; a new sense is created only at the end of a long chain of meanings. In surinam “les aquarelles de léningrad,” from 2005 [ fig. 21 ], Fries has added a new dimension to the multilayering of her pictures, for which she invokes the idea of the palimpsest: here she works with self-references in the form of screenprint reproductions of earlier works of the Merian cycle. These self references encode the pictures as an aesthetic message of multiple parts, with the possibility of an “unending regress.”¹¹ The link between the idea of the palimpsest and the question of authorship is broken by Fries, however, because here as well she is without doubt more interested in the amalgamation of the appropriated images with her own in hybrid pictures than in the artist becoming invisible in a multiple authorship.

III.

Pia Fries has created two new groups of work for the exhibition Krapprhizom Luisenkupfer in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. The enigmatically poetic title of the exhibition gives an indication of the form of her artistic approach to the location and its cultural influences. It refers to the business activities of Margravine Karoline Luise (1723–1783), who had red pigment produced in Baden from the madder plant (Krapppflanze). Fries describes the complex structures – the web of branches and compaction – of her pictures with a term from botany and more recently from philosophy, as rhizomatic; that is, having multiple roots.¹² The Karlsruhe Department of Drawings and Prints, with its historical presentation room, is on the one hand the location for the exhibition. On the other hand, its rich treasures of graphic art form the basis for these two new cycles as well as for the Chambre d’amis, which Fries has integrated into the exhibition with a subjectively weighted selection of historical prints and drawings– from Schongauer and Rembrandt, via Fragonard and Goya, to Cézanne and Menzel [ see pp. 179–189 ].

The two new series mark a new stage in Fries’s occupation with reproduced images, because now, for the first time, highly prized masterpieces of graphic art are appropriated and artistically reformed by her. With engravings by the Mannerist Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) and Baroque etchings by Stefano della Bella (1610–1664), Fries introduces various qualities of graphic art. In Goltzius she was impressed by the masterful curves, the powerful lines, and sculpturally structured figures of his engravings. With della Bella she was fascinated more by the sensitive and richly varied grain of his etchings, which – in complete contrast to the codified, fine lines of Goltzius – reveals affinities with a more freehand style of drawing. The Goltzius adaptations resulted in the group of eleven fahnenbild, while three prints by Goltzius and della Bella assisted in the creation of the kammerstück, twenty-six works on paper [ see pp. 148 f and 168 f].

For the Goltzius panels, Pia Fries chose an extract from the engraving The Great Standard Bearer, from 1587 [ fig. 22 ]. A “rushof dynamism” within Goltzius’s work is manifested in this print, which reveals itself in a more flexible line technique and a stronger plasticity in the way the body is represented and in the reproduction of materials resulting from this. As Karsten Müller has written, “The fabric panel (of the standard bearer) seems to be taut above all in order to demonstrate to the viewer a fine example of particular engraving ability. […] Long, parallel running waists that evoke folds and shadows only from the way they swell and subside impart a flowing smoothness and silky shine to the material. This banner thus becomes the hallmark for Goltzius’s art.”¹³ The characteristics of his line technique – the slightly curved, parallel, and more or less compact line crossing over itself, softly rising and falling – was also transferred by Goltzius to his brush technique, regarded more highly in the hierarchy of value, so that we can already observe in the work of the Mannerist the reversal of the levels of reproduction and original, graphic print and drawing.¹⁴ His biographer, Karel van Mander, praised Goltzius’s art of transformation: “The restrictions of the medium appear to be overcome with an almost playful ease.”¹⁵

Pia Fries continues this play with “making the reproduced unique,” as Charles W. Haxthausen has put it, on her own terms: she reproduces parts of the flag and, by isolating them from Goltzius’s visual context, lends them bizarre, completely abstract contours that result from excluding the figure of the standard bearer. These pieces she enlarges and prints on her wood panels, usually displaced many times. An engraving is turned into a silkscreen print, which is turned into a two dimensional texture, which contrasts strikingly with the white priming coat of the picture base. In parts she reverses line and ground by bringing light-colored graphic lines in front of a dark background, which places itself like a window into the picture plane. In this way, the Goltzius fragment is drawn completely to the side of Fries’s own internal visual reality and loses all external figurative references. Individual devices link elements of the picture to one another: by drawing out black lines with a fine brush, the artist accentuates individual batches, making connections between Goltzius and Fries. To this is added red paint, which in combination with the black-white of the lines and priming coat, determines the color triad of the new pictures. The paint substance appears here in the form of thick bulges, which the artist sets in motion in the work process by means of gravity. Smears of paint are mixed in an aleatory procedure and are driven partially with the brush into whirls of color or piled up into reliefs.

The vocabulary that is revealed in successive viewings of the pictures close up is familiar to a large extent from Fries’s work of recent years. The layering of printed passages and thick pigment would seem to be new in the process [ fig. 23 ], so that the graphic lines on the topography of paint can be read. Visually, the two layers can hardly be separated any more, as her own and the appropriated become completely merged. But above all, the view from a distance, the simultaneous viewing of the works as a whole, allows new pictures to arise. The group of works fahnenbild are without doubt more radical, harder, and more bulky than the earlier works. This resides on the one hand in the reduced color combination of black, white, and red, to which only a few other shades are added. Her more radical look results above all, however, from the “gestures that stage themselves.” The bizarre Goltzius derivatives and the self-confident sweeps of color can hardly “support” themselves anymore, as the artist puts it; they have to “cope with being a picture.”¹⁶

While the group fahnenbild are being presented in the cool rooms of the Mohl building of the Kunsthalle, Fries has chosen the historic presentation room of the department for the new kammerstück [ fig. 24 ] on paper, where they can appear in a multilayered reference system of architecture, wall and ceiling paintings, plaster pieces, and glass cabinets containing old book and graphic art collections, as well as for the Chambre d’amis, which she put together [ see pp.. 179 f]. The Department of Drawings and Prints, with its hidden treasures and the impulse these generate for retrieving, making visible, and remembering, can be seen as a compliment to the palimpsestlike methods Fries uses to create her pictures, which are associated with processes of sinking, overlaying, and rubbing out. Against this this backdrop, the kammerstück works on paper achieve a level of complexity and richness in meaning that previously did not exist in Fries’s work. This is due to the procedure of layering that begins already in this case with the picture bases, which themselves represent finished works. These are offset prints that Fries made as commissioned works for the award winners of a music competition. This explains the gold, silver, and copper colored stripes around the edges of the paper and their corresponding framing. These colored sheets were already hybrid works in themselves, presenting the disparate –in the unified form of the offset print – through changes in media and the visible edges of individual collage elements. The sheets were first processed by the artist with paint and partially covered, whereby elements of the offset prints lying beneath remained visible. Only then was the screenprint made with extracts from the graphic prints Three Galleys in a Storm, about 1646/47 [ fig. 25 ], and Two Half-Cartouches with Eagles and Snakes, 1646 [ fig. 26 ], by Stefano della Bella, and The Angel’s Annunciation to Manoah and His Wife of the Birth of Samson, 1586 [ fig. 27 ], by Hendrick Goltzius. White areas in gesso, which is otherwise used for the priming coat of wood panels, appear here in parts over the already existing image structures; maneuvers with the paintbrush, spatula, or ballpoint pen bring the picture surfaces to life, creating as yet unknown syntheses.

The watercolor The Five Senses, 1734 [ fig. 28 ], by Johann Evangelist Holzer (1709–1740), is one of the pictures that Fries has selected for her Chambre d’amis in the Kunsthalle. This French-inspired work by the Austrian Rococco artist shows in the disguise of a fête champêtre, a rural party at court, the personification of the senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling.¹⁷ The loose connection of figures around an open center and the glissando of the vibrating forms on the fanlike sheet caught the attention of the artist in the same way the iconography of the five senses did – that is, as the possibility of a visual representation aimed not only at the sense of vision, and the chance of a perception that can be provided not only through the eyes.

“It is essential that painting not be touched. It is essential that the image in general not be touched,” writes French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. “Therein lies its difference from sculpture, or at least sculpture can offer itself up to the eye and, in turn, to the hand – as when one walks around it, approaching to the point of touching and moving back in order to see. What is seeing if not a deferred touch? But what is a deferred touch if not a touching that sharpens or concentrates without reserve, up to a necessary excess, the point, the tip, and the instant through which the touch detaches itself from what it touches, at the very moment when it touches it? Without this detachment, without this recoil or retreat, the touch would no longer be what it is, and would no longer do what it does. […] It would begin to reify itself in a grip, in an adhesion or a sticking, indeed, in an agglutination that would grasp the touch in the thing and the thing within it, matching and appropriating the one to the other and then the one in the other. There would be identification, fixation, property, immobility.”¹⁸ A level of perception seems to have been found here that is offered by Pia Fries, and which is appreciated on a new level in her most recent works. The tangible quality of her art, which we record appropriately with a “reserved, non-possessive […] touching,” corresponds with her idea of the “eye as weighing instrument,” which “weighs up significances” – in other words, a seeing that refers to the sense of touch, a feeling that savors the difference between the optical and the haptic, an all-encompassing perception that includes the poetry of her titles just as much as the sound of the rooms and works that she has selected as the companions to her Karlsruhe project.