“Nothing is usually opposed to something; but the being of something is already determinate and is distinguished from another something; and so therefore the nothing which is opposed to the something is also the nothing of a particular something, a determinate nothing.”
-G. F. W. Hegel

“Occasionally a painting calls out from beyond its surface and asks us for our attention. The asking is polite enough, like a meeting between two strangers.”
-Eric Sutphin

Hegel is not necessarily the kind of philosopher that comes to my mind when I look at or think about art, nor have I ever heard his arguments used as the subject of a conversation during an exhibition opening. However, at the opening of “Null Komma Null” — the German painter Detlef E. Aderhold’s first solo show in New York — the term “aesthetic” circled within the gallery space. When used in more common, quotidian sense, “aesthetic” usually applies to a statement that is “concerned with beauty, art and the understanding of beautiful things,” or describes something that is “made in an artistic way and beautiful to look at.”[1] The notion of “aesthetics” consequently connotes a positive perceptual judgment (as opposed to its negative sibling of “anesthetics”) and evaluates a surface, form or arrangement that our eyes can linger on. Aderhold’s colorful paintings — which merge figuration and abstraction, and display a rich, often quite ambiguous texture and tactility — are surely beautiful to look at, yet most of them speak through a quality that calls from beyond a linen surface stretched onto a frame. They are aesthetic not in a common, but rather natural sense of the term.

When Hegel presented his ”Lectures on Aesthetics” in Berlin between 1820 and 1829, he grounded his subject in “the wide realm of the beautiful,” which he restricted to fine art, and understood aesthetic not as a qualitative statement, but as the science of sensation and feeling; while art presented the means to portray the human essence, at first in a physical form, and later “a more spiritual form.”[2] In his view, art consequently reveals or embodies ideas — things intangible and abstract by their very nature. Independent from whether one agrees with Hegel or not (not to speak about whether one fully understands him) there is something genuine in both his notions of aesthetic and art, and therefore they closely relate to Adernold’s paintings and artistic practice, because Aderhold’s work seeks an encounter that is based on visceral and sensitive understanding — preceding judgment and preconceptions.

The exhibition’s title has its origin in a small square painting recalling a fragmented female face. A pair of bright red lips, slightly off-center and enticingly opened to reveal the tips of an upper row of teeth, is joined by a single, dislocated eyeball staring from the upper right of the canvas. There are no lids, not even a hint that could ease the viewer from this constant gaze. However disturbing this impression might be, it is simultaneously calmed (or distracted) by overlapping, translucent patterns that fill the painting’s remaining space. Washed out swathes of mint green, soft pink and lemon yellow are joined by cloudlike formations of black and grey. This well-orchestrated visual chaos, of seemingly no end or real beginning except from the boundaries of the canvas, can be understood as a metonym for what Adernold’s work touches upon — affects — and is further emphasized by the work’s title. Null Komma Null (2011) translates as “zero point zero” and emphasizes Adnerold’s conscious decision to deprive his viewers of any linguistic and therefore logical or intellectual point of reference.

A similar kind of felt, visual noise is present in two other artworks. City 2 (2008) and Makes My Eyes Rain (2014) are large paintings of geometric forms that recall cityscapes, fragmented maps, perhaps even ruins. Even if Makes My Eyes Rain is more figurative in its nature, both images depend on and are ultimately held together by their dripping, fluidly colored backgrounds. The layers, stains and marks dissect, highlight and conceal, and thereby allude to a state of precariousness like a fading or incomplete memory, or the residue of a dream. The Force Take series (2012) instead confronts the viewer with lines and layers of color deprived of any figurative symbolism or “objective” representation. According to Eric Sutphin, who curated the show, affective states are the unifying conceptual principle in Aderhold’s practice, materializing through the formal element of the stain. These stains are often made of coffee or thinned paint, that appears to be acrylic, watercolors and ink— they emerge like diffuse bodies and bubbles, obliterate and allow new (two-dimensional) connections to be drawn, or rather seen. A notion of the psyche resonates within these paintings and ties into Adernold’s background as a psychotherapist.

In fact, Aufriss (2007) is a large collage taken from charts, graphs, illustration and notes, each of which originally provided maps of the human mind by documenting studies on how memory changes or is affected by the experience of negative and positive life-changing events. Considering the work’s systematic arrangement of numeric and textual sequences, its grid-like structure, as well as its use of information as aesthetic material, Aufriss recalls the work of Hanne Darboven. However, this complex drawing fulfills a kind of key function, not only for the show, but also for Adernold’s practice: the signs, numbers and schemes ultimately display not unrelated forms, but affective states that are reduced to or are encoded within indices. The surface then becomes a fragile façade for indiscernible chains of information, for something that is held within, somewhere between the mind and the guts.

[1] http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/aesthetic_1

[2]Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, ed. Michael Inwood, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London: Penguin, 1993), xiv, 3-4.

The post The Heart, the Mind, or Somewhere in Between: On Detlef E. Aderhold’s “Null Komma Null” appeared first on artcritical.

“This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.” -Elaine Scarry, “On Beauty and Being Just”

When photography was introduced into Africa in the mid-1800s, almost immediately after it had been invented in Europe, many photographic studios proliferated across the continent. Colonial fascination and curiosity established portrait photography as one of the major means not only for the European exploration and imagination of Africa, but also for creating typological and pictorial tropes of its people. When thinking about African Photography historically, from a Western perspective and in terms of an image-based creation of identity, those early ethnographic images were later joined and eventually questioned by practices such as war- and so-called documentary photography. The problem embedded within this visual archive and the perceptional expectations it can provoke, lies not in the fact that it is false or inadequate, but that it is fragmentary and exclusive. And in being so, this ‘Eurocentric’ archive prevails over the counter-archive of aesthetically rich and complex images African photographers have been producing since the late 19th century.

Samuel Fosso, born in Cameroon in 1962, is a photographer who challenges various visions of African identity through the means of self-portraiture. Since the mid-1970s, Fosso has been reflecting and commenting on African and Afro-American topics and tropes prevalent in global visual culture. His exhibition of 39 photographs currently on view at The Walther Collection provides a selective, yet thorough, survey of his early commercial and personal work, as well as his more recent, explicitly iconographic series, all of which are connected through Fosso’s almost unbelievable capacity of transforming his body through costume and performance. After fleeing the late-1960s civil war in Nigeria, Fosso ran a photo studio in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. While taking pictures for paying clients during the day (some of which are exhibited in library), he turned the camera on himself at night. His earliest works are represented by a series of six black-and-white photographs capturing him in thoughtfully elaborated poses and styles, which were inspired by images of celebrities, such as the Nigerian musician Prince Nico Mbarga and James Brown. These silent, almost contemplative pictures not only transmit a teenager’s pleasure in showing his lithe body in tight shirts and bellbottoms, but also allude to the transformative power that studio photography had assumed during the CAR’s dictatorial rule by Jean-Bédel Bokassa. During this time, citizens’ social and cultural life was restricted just as much as their relationships with their bodies, which were considered sacred and therefore not supposed to be exhibited or exalted. Fosso’s photographic work is not only an escape or modality to embrace the beautiful, but an artistic means providing the capacity to heal and reinvent oneself, to treat the roots of suffering, instead of anesthetically masking their symptoms.

A more satirical and colorful approach is found in Fosso’s “Tati” series, named after the Parisian department store — located in the neighborhood of Barbès, where many immigrant communites from Africa live — which invited the photographer to create the series in 1997. While exploring himself through different identities, Fosso assumed stereotypical characters such as the tribal chief or the “liberated” African-American woman. Le chef qui a vendu l’Afrique aux colons (1997) refers back to ethnographic pictorial tropes, promoted by early colonial studio photography, but is simultaneously a critical, even mocking comment on iconographic self-staging of African chiefs. Seated in front of multiple panels of printed fabric (a studio setting, of course) “le chef,” alias Fosso, is dressed in a fake leopard pelt, covered with gold chains and wearing narrow white shades, while clutching a bunch of sunflowers in his hands. In a 2004 interview, Fosso said, “I think that also very colorful, apparently happy photographs can express anger and indignation. […] We have this ugly history of lacking respect for our own people, a history from which we are still unable to escape with many of the new politicians.” The “Tati” series consequently presents not only a photographic mode suggesting the need of self-reflection, but also an intelligent strategy of merging archival and political, African and Western imagery of Africa without being didactic. Yet another notion of healing and pain reappears in a more literal sense within two series from the early 2000s. “Le rève de mon grandpère” (2003) is a reenactment of and homage to Fosso’s grandfather, a chief and healer, who cured Fosso of a paralysis he suffered as a child. The highly saturated color photographs emphasize Fosso’s facial expressions and thereby counteract his physical presence captured in the two black-and-white images of the other series, “Mémoire d’un ami” (2000). As opposed to most of his other works, this series was not staged in a clearly discernable studio, but in the privacy of a bedroom, deprived of any special scenery. Instead of performing an appropriated character, it is now Fosso himself who poses for the camera. His body is captured from the back, naked and almost naked, as if trying to escape and not inviting the photographic lens. The delicate balance in posturing exposes Fosso’s usually so-metamorphic features as lonely and vulnerable — even more so because of the carefully scattered lighting, that simultaneously emphasizes and blurs the contours of his body. In fact, these grainy images recall the traumatic experience of loss, anger and helplessness, when an acquaintance of Fosso was burglarized in his neighboring apartment and the photographer could not come in time to help him.

Fosso is not a photographer who declares himself as explicitly political, informative or educational. Instead he wants to speak about what he knows, what concerns him and about what he feels morally. This artistic belief is also found in what is perhaps Fosso’s most important series, entitled “African Spirits” (2008), in which he embodies iconic figures from the African Independence and American Civil Rights movements, ranging from Angela Davis to Haïlé Sėlassié, Patrice Lumumba to Muhammad Ali. Drawn from magazines and newspapers, these figures are not only symbols of postcolonial freedom, but also images that have been republished in different contexts and for new ideas. They are part of a visual archive, a collective memory that is not fixed or finished, but subject to change. Fosso’s self-portraits are images that oscillate between documents and appropriations, imagination and performance, challenging Western, as well as Eastern iconographies and modes of creating identities. Instead of plainspoken obviousness, he carefully dissects and reassembles photographic tropes, and thereby re-directs and — locates our perceptive habits and assumptions. In his most recent series, entitled “The Emperor of Africa” (2013), for example, Fosso explores the propaganda imagery of Mao Tse-tung, while implicitly alluding to China’s more and more prominent economic presence in Africa. What is so satisfying about his photographs is not only that they are beautiful and smart, but that they reveal the deep cultural and visual thinking that created them, without losing a sense of humor and satire.

The post “Would You Please Keep Looking, Please?”: Samuel Fosso at the Walther Collection appeared first on artcritical.