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LIGHT ACCUMULATORS

Martin Voßwinkel works with colour as a physically tangible material just as much as with its immaterial effect and application as an element of a painting's composition. In doing so, the brilliance of colour has always played an important role in his work. "Light accumulators" - actually light cannot be stored. It is possible to store heat, but light? Yet precisely this phenomenon is a focal point in to-day's scientific research and what sounds absurd now seems nevertheless possible in the not too distant future. The idea of a light accumulator fascinates Martin Voßwinkel and inspires him to do paintings in which colour and light, atmosphere and brilliance seem inherent in the picture.

For a long time he used to search for colour pigments himself and to use them, with an acrylic binder, as a painting medium. In paintings initially monochrome and restrained he also mixed sand and soil and experimented with chlorophyll and elder as colour substances. In the mid 1990s he discovered clay as a creative means - he mixed it with pigments and began to roll small coloured clay balls over the paper. Under his hand's pressure they left their coloured traces until they were finally used up. This movement was at first irregular and chaotic, but gradually it became more flowing and curving.

In this manner Martin Voßwinkel decorates long, narrow paper webs designed for horizontal placement and criss-crossed by coloured lines about 2 cm wide and calls them "Rollfelder" (runways). Drawn out over a light or dark blue base and over the edge of the picture, they look like traces of coloured light of even sun and star orbits in distant galaxies. In spite of their delicateness and fragility these coloured lines also evoke something physical in that their at times cautious, sometimes broad sweeps convey a sense of the artist's arm movements. In other "runways", however, sometimes titled "networks", the picture field is literally plaited up (completely covered) with a tight tangle of lines or bands. In these nets the coloured bands run less along open trails, they rather form dense self-contained structures at times angular and curved and entwined and applied in many layers one on top of the other.

Martin Voßwinkel calls these paintings, which follow two different approaches of composition, either open or closed systems. Open systems are characterised by only offering a detail: The picture is like a window that opens onto part of a larger whole which we are unable to see. The feeling of looking into a macroscopic world like that of the firmament alternates with the impression of beholding magnified microscopic structures.

However, in the closed systems the line remains within the picture square. It is being curved and broken and led back towards the centre of the painting as soon as it comes near the border of the picture. In this way a dense network of lines grows until finally the impression of a compact colour body may arise. At the same time when viewing these pictures and attempting to optically follow the course of the tracks, the duration of the work process and thus a time quality becomes evident and comprehensible.

The painting ground is often not paper but an acrylic plate. To intensify the colour effect, Martin Voßwinkel superimposes two or three acrylic plates over each other which are painted on both sides. On the other hand he uses the transparency of the material and draws reduced, delicate stripes onto the acrylic plates. These plates are exhibited a small distance away from the wall so that the shadows cast onto the wall constitute as much of an image element as the stripes themselves.

Martin Voßwinkel likes experimenting and is always looking for new possibilities of implementing his pictorial ideas. As he formerly used clay balls to put organically plaited bands on the surface of the picture, so later he applied the colour with foam rubber rolls of various widths. In a combination of creating and of documenting the work process, he sometimes endows his works with a strong spatial component by integrating into the picture in a collage-like manner pieces of foam rubber or parts of tools used in making it. Some "roll pictures" were made like this, titled "colour mills". Here Voßwinkel fixes several colour-soaked foam rubber rolls in rows next to and on top of each other and places them inside a wooden box. He forms a similar spatial structure with air cushion rectangles from packaging foil. In contrast to the compact roll pictures, these picture objects, each kept in one basic colour, appear airy and light because of their transparent material.

These new pictures are characterised by a certain regularity and a quieter, more balanced appearance. The lines no longer form a confusing tangle but are oriented towards the picture edges. This leads to more or less wide rhythmic lattice fields which alternate with coloured patches of different width and seek a balance between small-scale structure and quiet surface. These "empty" coloured surfaces are usually considerably lightened. Only apparently monochrome, they are really built up of a number of transparent colour layers. Repeated rolling-off and superposition of such layers produces a colour field which begins to vibrate and pulsate when looked at at length and thus becomes a space of dense light or a pictorial light accumulator.

At first Martin Voßwinkel rather created such upright format pictures divided into horizontal fields of different width as small formats on paper, but of late he makes them in larger dimensions with acrylic on hard foam plates. Simultaneously, however, he continues to make simple geometric forms like plain colour squares as floating centres of a harmonic sequence of equable square pictures. Painted both sides on acrylic glass and hung up at some distance from the wall, they have the effect of silent, unobtrusive light and colour accumulators, whilst the colour in the lattice and colour fields mentioned above radiantly thrusts forward into the room.

Martin Voßwinkel's colour scheme has changed over the years. In contrast to former times, now pastel shades in pleasant colour combinations often appear. Created intuitively and yet produced methodically, his newest works are also born out of the tension between structure and plane, condensation and emptiness, colour and light.

Katerina Vatsella - Translation: Joan Leisewitz