SEBASTIAN HACKENSCHMIDT

Beyond Disillusion
Kees Goudzwaard and the Dialectical Tension of Painting

This text is a highly condensed and slightly altered version of a text first published in Kees Goudzwaard - Schilderijen, SMAK, Ghent 2005, and published again in Sequent, Culturgest, Lisbon, and Roma Publications, Amsterdam 2006.

When I first came across one of Kees Goudzwaard's paintings in the basement twilight of a run-down villa on Hamburg's Rothenbaumchausee I was tricked, too. The place that Philippe Van Cauteren had discovered for a series of small exhibitions in 2002-03 was the extreme opposite of the clean white cube of a museum or gallery space. Nevertheless, it was an adequate environment for an exhibition as it seemed to question the conventional notions and traditional media of art. Although most works were prominently displayed, one could, at first, not be sure whether the heap of cables on the floor were indeed arranged as a work of art or simply left behind by the electricians. Likewise, the interesting figurations on the walls could almost have been an artistic intervention instead of mere damage caused by water. In this setting, Goudzwaard's Bladspiegel (2002) was definitely marked as an artwork - but I didn't take it as a painting, at first: Not expecting a "straight" oil-on-canvas-painting, I mistook it for a board with strips of adhesive tape and fell for what the art historian E.H. Gombrich, in his book on "Art & Illusion", poetically described as the "twilight realm of suspended disbelief."1 Gombrich was referring to the illusive effects of painting which, apparently, were first explored by the Ancient Greeks and gave rise to such myths as the story of Zeuxis. First told by Pliny the Elder, it has long since become an important topos in art: Countless eye-deceiving still-lifes as Cornelis de Heem's Stilleven met bloemen en vruchten (17th century) contain bunches of grapes and suggest the painter's intention to have his work judged as a perfect artistic imitation of nature (mimesis).

By confirming the deceptive illusionism of his paintings from my own experience, I do not want to assert that it is an effect that Goudzwaard inevitably aims for, but rather describe it as a specific quality of his works. While Bladspiegel (2002) or Klein Vanitas (1996) seem to be boards with an all-over structure of adhesive tape, paintings like Volière (1996) or Panorama (1996) evoke the materiality of a pin-board hanging on the wall: We can make out chart and diagram papers, transparent foil, handwritten letters or pages from a diary, typed documents, printed newspapers, but mostly plain sheets of paper in different colours and formats - all set into place by the ever-present strips of tape.2 In this respect, Goudzwaard's illusive "lay-outs" of various papers may be associated with the manner of the trompe l'oeil, in which the depictions of the objects are so deceptive that they appear to be the things themselves.

Some Northern European baroque still-lifes, in particular, offer tempting comparisons to Goudzwaard's pictures: As one of the many sub-genres of the still-life, the so-called letter-racks, which were fashioned by seventeenth-century painters like Samuel van Hoogstraten, Wallerand Vaillant and Cornelis Gijsbrechts, display arrangements of letters and papers on a level surface. Vaillants Board with Letters, Penknifes and Quills behind Red Straps (c. 1658), for instance, very realistically suggests the material presence of an assortment of letters, some of which still have bits of sealing wax attached, a quill and a penknife. The letters seem to be fastened to a pine board by several red straps and on top of the board the date of the painting is apparently scrawled in chalk.3 While the letters cast some convincing shadows, the light is realistically reflected on the blade of the knife and the pins that hold the strips. The two pendant letter racks by Cornelis Gijsbrechts (1664) from the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Gent, which devote the same care to the texture of the depicted objects, seem partially hidden behind drapes - referring, of course, to the curtain of Parrhaisios, which, like the grapes of Zeuxis, has become a topos of art as well.

Compared to most other still-lifes, the spatial illusion is highly reduced in these trompe l'oeil paintings; the viewers seem to be looking at flat boards on which letters, documents and small appliances are spread out and do not create much spatial depth even when they overlap - arrangements that in reality would not be significantly more substantial than the paintings themselves. Although these pictures are nonetheless two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional objects, the spatial illusion considerably approached the flatness of the picture plane. So even if the letter racks were still intended to make their viewers forget that they were looking at artworks and instead to be taken as reality, already at this stage in the history of art, the "window on the world" is about to be closed. From here, it is only a small step to Cornelis Gijsbrechts' The Reverse of a Framed Painting (1670), which defines the painting as being only a canvas - "the result of painting's radical questioning of itself and its growing self-confidence."4

Obviously, artists have continued to reflect on the picture as a medium. Since the 19th century, the emphasis on the flat picture plane has corresponded more and more with tendencies towards abstraction and the emergent rejection of illusion. In the still-lifes of Paul Cezanne, for example, the objects are no longer organized in an illusory three-dimensional space, but are fixed in a two-dimensional texture of colour-forms. This texture, in which objects and space have the same material consistency as paint, is constructed as a constant shifting between what is left of the linear perspective and the autonomous reality of the painting itself. Only a few years later, in the cubist pictures of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it had become almost impossible to separate space and objects as both are interlaced in a web of formal relations. In their papiers collés, both artists even employed pieces of newspaper, wallpaper, musical sheets or the label from a wine bottle to further ascertain the picture as a an autonomous entity. As fragments of reality itself, these collaged papers seem to intensify the effects of a trompe l'oeil while simultaneously disrupting the closeness of the pictorial reality. Being as flat as the picture plane or a layer of paint, the two-dimensional materials of everyday life are a game of painterly illusionism and at the same time foreign to the conventional concept of painting. So aside from their traditional subject matter as still-lifes, interior scenes or portraits, these collage-paintings took a major step towards the independence of the artwork.

With Piet Mondrian the pictorial means of the cubists were eventually directed towards non-objective painting. The swerving lines and the multi-facetted colour fields of Picasso and Braque were adjusted to fit austere grids of horizontal and vertical lines, which enclose fields of pure colour (red, yellow, blue) and non-colour (black, white, grey), as in his Composition with Yellow, Red, Black, Blue and Grey (1920). This path of abstraction from the highly realistic baroque still-lifes to the early stages of non-objective painting loses itself in the many movements, styles and -isms for which classical modernity paved the way.

This development of art towards reflection on its own means and especially the flatness of the picture plane is not only inherent in Goudzwaard's paintings as some sort of historical unconscious but seems to me visible as a deliberate attempt to reverse this development: His imagery begins with collecting various papers and assembling them as the models for his paintings on a 1:1 scale. By applying the materials in several layers to a flat rectangular surface an idea slowly takes shape and becomes an image. This image, however, which is then carefully painted in oil colour - piece by piece and layer upon layer - does not in itself bear much resemblance to the trompe l'oeil realism of a baroque still-life. Instead, the apparent arrays of sheets and pieces of paper have a definite "modern" look: In a way, the paper models themselves can be seen as imitations of painterly abstraction, while the paintings of these model images are illusionary projections - highly realistic and abstract at the same time. By faithfully transferring the material textures into paint, the sheets of paper become geometric colour-fields and form grid-like structures which are further emphasized - or broken through - by the painted strips of tape. So in spite of their material illusionism, Goudzwaard's unframed paintings relate to numerous traditions of abstract and non-figurative paintings. Comprising many styles of 20th-century art - as well as containing many of their inherent aesthetic features and implications - Goudzwaard's work could, to a certain extent, be filed under painting about painting.

Though exactly by transferring the material textures of his paper models into paint - and in spite of the indispensable abstraction of such a transfer - his paintings develop an illusionism that is intrinsically foreign to non-objective painting. It is, of course, not the illusory, three-dimensional space of the Old Masters that one might imagine oneself walking into. However, nor does it exhaust itself in a modern and strictly pictorial illusion through which one can travel only with the eye.5 Goudzwaard follows the procedure of applying many different layers of paint - to give the image a certain weightless, light quality. Simultaneously, his canvases receive a certain depth from these overlapping, transparent layers of paint that seems indeed close to the Greenbergian illusion of "Modernist Painting." Yet there is an additional tactile, almost tangible space, created by the trompe-l'oeil effects of material illusionism. And although this illusory space does not trigger the thought of physically entering it, it still may deceive the travelling eye.

As this seems to me the crucial point in Goudzwaard's pictures, I would like to focus on the artist's notion of transferring the material texture of his paper models into paint - which is not an altogether new concept. In the introductory courses ("Vorlehre") at the Weimar Bauhaus, the study of material textures was obligatory in order to heighten the awareness of matter and facilitate the decision to make a more dedicated commitment to a specific material in the workshops ("Werkstätten") later on. Johannes Itten, who developed these preliminary material studies ("Materiestudien" or "Materialstudien"), set a high value on the registration of different material textures, qualities, and intensities and had his students build up "chromatic" rows of various materials. In addition, the natural surfaces ("Texturen") of these materials were often manipulated by assorted tools to alter their tactile appearances ("Fakturen"). The montage of these - natural and factitious - materials attests not only to the introduction of new techniques of shaping, but also to the use of glass, wool, rinds, feathers, fur, leather, wire or cloth that were only just becoming worthy of art and resulted in "fantastic creations of a wholly new effect."6

A small collage of different papers and cartons by Paul Klee, who was also a member of the Bauhaus at the time, gives a good impression of what these Bauhaus studies looked like (Study, 1928). Apart from its much smaller size, this study appears very similar to the paper models that Goudzwaard bases his paintings on (Leporello, 2001). And very likely, Klee's study may also have been intended as a chromatic exploration for a painting or the design of a textile. Itten, too, had been making collages and montages with paper and other fabrics ("Materialmontagen") since the First World War. However, in his material study courses as well as in his own experiments, he was hardly interested in producing artworks and mainly used these montages as a means for new compositions in form and colour. Much like Goudzwaard's approach, his students had to imitate the materials as accurately as possible and "translate" the tactile and optical qualities of matter - its "texture" and "facture" - into paint. But as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy described in his 1929 Bauhaus book Von Material Zu Architektur with reference to Itten's classes, these exercises, were also intended solely as a close observation of the materials and not as works of art in their own right.7

Obviously, the material study courses at the Bauhaus were meant as a basic training for the pupils and, accordingly, Itten - above all - hoped to nurture his student's sensibility to art's resources: As early as 1917 he had noted in his diary that, by way of these studies, even a simple line should be perceived as something tactile and material.8 And although some very convincing nature studies were created in his introductory courses, it was after all not the imitation of the external reality that mattered for the art of painting at the Bauhaus, but the essential components of the picture itself. Not surprisingly, the artworks produced by Bauhaus masters like Moholy-Nagy and Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers openly acknowledge the elements that "constitute the medium of painting - the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment" - and are in consequence pure "Modernist Painting" in Greenberg's sense.9

In this reagard, Goudzwaard's pictures are not at all to be reduced to the effects of an illusionary trick. Instead, it looks to me as if by this very aesthetic means - which could be described as a conceptual and post-modern update of the Bauhaus studies - the artist has found his own way of creating a painterly space, in which the illusionism of the Old Masters can coexist - on a very abstract level - with the non-figurative colour fields of modern and contemporary art. By choosing modernist arrays of flat papers as his "motifs", illusionism and non-figuration, realism and abstraction, Modernism and Post-Modernism are held in suspense.


Footnotes
1. E.H. Gombrich: Art & Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960), London, 1994, p. 172.
2. Goudzwaard sees the tape as playing a "meditative role", adding more "materiality" and "figuration" to the transcendent fields of pure colour. Kees Goudzwaard in an e-mail to the author, 12th March 2005.
3. See Lynn Russel on Vaillant, in: Exhib. Cat.: Deceptions and Illusions. Five Centuries of Trompe l'Oeil Painting, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2002, p. 190.
4. See Sybille Ebert-Schifferer: "Trompe l'Oeil: The Underestimated Trick", in: Deceptions and Illusions, pp. 16-37, 33.
5. "Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no other art, and so the Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else. The Old Masters had sensed that it was necessary to preserve what is called the integrity of the picture plane: that is, to signify the enduring presence of flatness under the most vivid illusion of three-dimensional space. [...] The flatness towards which Modernist painting orients itself can never be an utter flatness. The heightened sensitivity of the picture plane may no longer permit sculptural illusion, or trompe-l'oeil, but it does and must permit optical illusion. The first mark made on a surface destroys its virtual flatness, and the configurations of a Mondrian still suggest a kind of illusion of a kind of third dimension. Only now it is a strictly pictorial, strictly optical third dimension. Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine oneself walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can only look, can travel through only with the eye." Clement Greenberg: "Modernist Painting" (1960, revised 1965), in: Charles Harrison / Paul Wood (eds.): Art in Theory 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 754-760, 756 & 758.
6. "At Bauhaus, I had long chromatic series made out of natural materials, for the tactile assessment of different textures. The students had to feel the sequences of textures with their fingertips, keeping their eyes closed. Their sense of touch would soon improve amazingly. Later, I had textured montages made out of contrasting materials. These resulted in fantastic creations of a wholly new effect." Johannes Itten, Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus. Gestaltungs- und Formenlehre, Ravensburg, 1963, p. 47.
7. "The object of these exercises was a close observation of the materials. The closeness to the nature of the materials was to be developed to the point of the most deceptive resemblance. This activity was not to be mixed up with any artistic intent. The exercises aimed solely at enhancing a 'skill'." Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Von Material Zu Architektur, Berlin, 1929, p. 63.
8. "So I hope that in this way the the line is perceived as something material, that the love of the line arises from the love of silk." Johannes Itten, Diary, 12 May 1917, cit. Rainer K. Wick, Johannes Itten. Kunstpädagogik als Erlebnispädagogik?, Lueneburg, 1997, p. 50. K. Wick: Johannes Itten. Kunstpädagogik als Erlebnispädagogik?, Lüneburg, 1997, p. 50.
9. Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, p. 755.