The genesis of Umlauff’s painting and its evolutionary development up to the ‘Iterations’ with their concentration on the colours blue and red has been described already ( Kulschewskij, Catalogue, ‘Umlauff, Iterationen’ 2002 and Internet).. This reduction was concerned with focussing in on these colours which were held to be more elementary (than red).

The attempt to get to the essence of them phenomenologically was evident both in optical and intellectual terms. The clear effort ‘not merely to marginalise the red, but to eliminate it completely’, could not succeed for what where initially mysterious reasons. Into the corresponding relationship between yellow background areas on which were drawn elements in blue something alien intrudes. What appears to the eye to be a softly coloured indeed almost classical harmony conceals an irritant. Even where geomorphous contours can be perceived that might conceivably be associated with earth and water there emerges in light but unmistakable tints a strange, third phenomenon. An intensive gaze discovers in addition to the two painted colours a third colour which is certainly not painted: a shimmering pink for example or a translucent red. - gemalte Farbe: ein schimmerndes Rosa etwa oder ein luzides Rot.

It is indeed this third element, which first of all gently, but then in an increasingly compelling fashion, both fascinates and stimulates the eye. Many pictures in more recent colour painting induce so called after-images in the respective complementary colours ( if for example you look long enough at a green painting by Gonschior you ‘see’ the after-image red). In order to solve this problem when composing with colours traditional painters like to introduce a definite fixed red point or a little red patch into the picture (it can be seen particularly clearly in constructivist artists). This is decidedly not the case with Jürgen Umlauff. He makes a point of thematising this dilemma in the phenomenon of seeing, in order if at all possible to get to the roots of it. As an incorrible empiricist he investigates that decisive point of parousia, at which the human brain intervenes unexpectedly between the painted surfaces and the painted entities on them. It plays a remarkable trick on its own eyes as it were! With its normative demands which have been legitimised by its experience of seeing it ‘corrects’ the reality of the painted image. It ‘ displays ’ between the forms applied in watercolour on paper or watercolour and acrylic on cotton something which in reality does not exist.

What we have here is ‘image-ination’ in the most subtle sense of the word. Over and above the initial irritation this manifestation retains something of the nimbus of a ‘purely intellectual’ event, or at least that of a supra-natural phenomenon (concepts such as ‘Nimbus’‘Aura’ or ‘Halo’ were other attempts to define it, see Kulschewskij op cit)

Jürgen Umlauff’s ‘Iterations’ are insistent advances towards a particular frontier: that is, the boundary between seeing and perception. In constantly renewed attempts to draw nearer to this boundary in concrete painting terms he is researching the essence of colour and the conditions under which it is seen by the human mind: ‘esse percipi’, that is, ‘to be is to be perceived’. A younger generation has now followed on from the older representatives of colour painting (Jochims, Hofschen, Gonschior, Erben). Jürgen Umlauff (born 1960) is one of the most interesting of this new generation. With disciplined sensitivity but without any utopian imponderables - these are supplied all too readily by the human imagination, as we well know - he is practising an investigative form of art.