Genuine Colour Painting and Integral Consciousness (On the most recent developments in Jürgen Umlauff’s work 2006)

By Ralf Kulschewskij (Translation: Dr. Godfrey Carr)

In the way that it investigates colour Jürgen Umlauff’s painting is in the truest meaning of the word ‘genuine’. It is real, unadulterated, colour painting without allusions to subjects or other forms. Indeed it is unaffected by any preconceived notion of a ‘picture’ imposed on the pure act of painting. We have already reported on the implications of his truly enlightening painting for the theory of colours and for art history. (Catalogue ‘Iterations’ 2003). On the occasion of his first blue and yellow ‘Boundary Observations’ the regressive behaviour of yellow and the dynamic tendency of blue was noted, together with the difficulty of eliminating a red which unexpectedly appeared as a halo or aura. It is this red, which is not the effect of actual painting, though still optically perceptible, and its irritating effect ( see Catalogue ‘Iterations’ 2006) which is the immediate concern of Umlauff in his latest work.

Those pictures, under the title ‘Iterations’, approach through a process of repetition and variation that remarkable feature of the human perception of colour, which might also be described as the ‘simulative effect’. As is well known, an actual mixing of blue and yellow produces green, but our brain corrects the empirically functioning eye in a normative process which introduces a misleading red into our vision. In the painting ‘Red tendency’ it appears completely visible and yet can be clearly distinguished from the ‘colourless’ background of the canvas. In the painting ‘Green - Tendency’, however, this red peripheral phenomenon no longer appears , the blue and yellow areas, which are closer together here, now produce a marginal green effect – the extensive group of works which make up Umlauff’s ‘Boundary Observations’ has here reached its goal – that of eliminating the dubious red.

These two pictures which were created at the same time (2005) offer a powerful testimony to the stringency, that is, the inner logic and harmony in the cultural development of a painter, who is so important in the work of visually exploring colours. Furthermore, the pursuit of three forms of blue in the darker forms and in the lighter surrounding surfaces and in the underlying yellow in the picture ‘Green-Tendency’ shows an optical tension, which has a lasting effect and in the end produces an imaginary plasticity. In the same way a filigree network of squares drawn with a lead pencil gives a lively spatial depth. Yet this exceptional vibrancy of forms in Umlauff’s work is promptly followed by a more severe reduction of forms.

In a form of syncretism they are still have a vestigial presence moving like wild dervishes in a picture which the artist has called ‘St George’ (with a painting by Delacroix in mind). But, characteristically, they remain limited to their own particular ‘optical’ square -- though now accompanied at close quarters by a quite new, almost ritualized, symbolism strictly reduced to vertical and horizontal linearity. The ‘Figures’ apparently dancing in a totally unrestrained manner, with their red halo effect shimmering like an aura, are constrained by a rigorously formalized network. Where does this draconian order come from?

The oldest Chinese Book ‘ I-Ching’ or ‘The Book of Changes’ attempts nothing less than to provide through a strictly structured thought process an answer to the basic question of life ‘What should I do?’. First of all, a collection of symbols devised for the purposes of the oracle is marked so that ‘Yes’ is a simple diagonal line and ‘No’ a broken one. Through the use of greater differentiation 64 combinations are produced each of 6 lines, so-called hexagrams (also ‘pictures’ or hsiang in Chinese). This completely self-contained system of categories, in which each sign has its own significance and every possible combination of these individual symbols has a clearly comprehensible interpretation, not only claims to include the totality of the world , but also to understand it in its process of continual change, hence the name ‘The Book of Changes’ . By this is meant the transformations of the world, of objects, of space through time. Thus, it is not primarily a matter of comprehending the world, but of comprehending the world insofar as it affects the life of human beings.

Umlauff has adapted these 64 I-Ching Hexagrams, modifying the quasi ‘ digital bar-coding’ in an individual way, introducing vertical lines, centimeter square points, angles, hooks, meanders, empty and filled squares. In this way he arrives at a new awareness of change through time and thus of the understanding of life. Moreover, taking up the Swiss cultural philosopher, Jean Gebser’s, idea of an ‘ integral structure of consciousness’ (c.f. his work ‘The Origin and the Present ’, Stuttgart 1966, especially page 121), Umlauff – like the experimental composer John Cage in some of his compositions – forms the 64 separate pictures in his major work, I Ching Iterations, into a comprehensive total tableau. And this in itself already very actively changing tableau is augmented by a video sequence of 64 individual films, the running order of which is governed by a specially designed dice system. Every 12 seconds there is a break and – for the sensitive onlooker – a different awareness of the sea-sky-horizon. ’64 ×12’sec’ is a sequence of natural views compressed into 12 minutes and 48 seconds of artistic scenes.

According to the artist, both the ‘mythical sense of time as well as the mental orientation by time’ are disturbed with the aid of the principle of randomness as the basis of the creative process introduced by the throw of the dice - if indeed they are not completely eliminated. But engaged observers of the works must verify this for themselves. These most recent works by the painter Jürgen Umlauff act as catalysts on traditionally formed categories of thought. The result is that attentive spectators may possibly experience with their own eyes and in their own minds a spectacularly progressive concretization of the adjectival ‘panta’; (‘all’ in Hesiod) through the substantival ‘ta panta’ (‘everything’ in Heraclitus) to the singular ‘to pan’ (‘the totality’) in Empedocles.