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Over
the past five years, Volker Saul has followed with his art a steady path
of simplification and reduction: From "all-over" paintings with
automatic drawings on broad expanses of color (1)
to the isolation and magnification of individual signs as independent
forms painted either directly on the wall or cut out from wood to create
oddly shaped, monochrome panels. Saul´s most recent work - I hesitate
somewhat to call it an apotheosis, because every time I visit his studio
it seems he has attained a new artistic paradigm, and I´m sure he
wont disappoint me the next time either - is, let us say, one possible
culmination (there are sure to be others) of five years of dedicated experimentation.
In Saul´s most recent works, color has been completely eliminated,
resulting in achromatic paintings, white being a non-color, or rather
all the colors of the spectrum together. Viewed scientifically, white
is caused by the reflection of all the rays that produce color. Saul´s
use of white as a "neutral" color for his shaped panels places,
in principle at least, greater emphasis on the form itself, which in turn
has once again become complex, with a myriad of corners and curves. If
white is used to hinder work-external associations and interpretations
(although one might argue that white is just as associative as any other
color, symbolizing purity, virginity, and goodness, among other things),
the complex intricacy of the forms themselves open a profusion of possible
meanings and decodings. The traditional goal of Minimalism - to reduce
art to its essentials and to deny metaphorical interpretations - is perhaps
impossible since any interpretation is subjective (objectivity being a
modernist myth). This is especially true if, as is the case with post-modernism,
the viewer is to be granted his own autonomy, so that a dependency develops
between the viewer and the viewed.
The artist continues to work within the Spannungsfeld between order and
chaos, whereby the latter is to be understood not in its more negative,
metaphorical sense, but rather in terms of recent chaos theory and research,
based to a great extent within Benoit Mandelbrot´s concept of the
"Fractal." According to John Briggs and F. David Peat, "This
artificial word is derived from the Latin word 'frangere' which means
'to break.' And the references to 'broken' numbers and to the irregularity
of 'fragments' determined Mandelbrot´s choice of words." (2)
Mandelbrot´s Fractal is the foundation of a new geometry, which
in the past 30 years has come to influence all fields of scientific and
creative activity. Fractals are useful in describing the (regular) irregularity
of the real world, from the forms of coast lines and clouds, rivers and
the human circulatory system, polymers and galaxies. What appears irregular
and chaotic is in fact the result of what Mandelbrot calls self-analogy.
By this he means "the repetition of the detail on increasingly smaller
scales," (3) understood
in terms of fractal geometry. They are the result of hundreds, if not
thousands, of small drawings and scribbles. (4)
"Worthy" forms are sorted out, isolated and enlarged. What appears
at first glance to be a unique, accidental form reveals itself in context
to the part of a continuum, one of a seemingly infinite number of similar
forms. Parts of certain forms reflect the whole of the forms themselves,
just as each individual form reflects the conglomerate of forms that comprises
the exhibition.
The constant flux between part and whole, between form and anti-form,
between chaos and order, continues to determine Volker Saul´s art.
Minimalistic in his strict reduction of form and color, he is at the same
time a Maximalist in his baroque-ness and openness with regard to the
viewer's autonomy. If the rigidity of the Minimalists of the 1960s brought
about a general fear of the incumbent "death of painting," Volker
Saul clearly demonstrates that painting is in a constant state of rebirth.
(1)
See my article: "Volker Saul. Kunst, Sprache und Strukturalismus"
in APEX, No 10, 1990, p. 35-39.
(2) John Briggs and F. David Peat. Die Entdeckung des Chaos. Eine Reise
durch die Chaos-Theorie. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1990. p. 129.
(3) ibid.
(4)
See: Solker Saul: Rotverschiebung. Catalogue to the exhibition of the
same name at the Dortmunder Kunstverein, 20 September through 16 October
1991. With a text by Hanna Humeltenberg. Gérard A. Goodrow
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