Publikationen

Rollfeld

Change is the Constant Factor
On Martin Vosswinkel's "Rollfelder" Works.

There is a sort of initiation at the start of Martin Vosswinkel's new series of works. It is an "aha experience" of the almost mystical kind. Until then the artist had created static, block-like, concentrated pictures. Pictures that look like pieces of nature with their cracked and fissured physiognomy. As if they wished to overcome the difference between the beauty of art and the beauty of nature. Only gradually do pigments of colour move into these works without disturbing the impression of natural and nature-like tectonics. The artist distributes earth and colours in his pictures like a peasant sows seed on his land. Yet Vosswinkel's ritualized movements are executed in a highly meditative concentration. Completely absorbed by what he does, the artist with sharpened senses nevertheless registers in a microscopic way what happens in his immediate surroundings.

One day a clump of earth is loosened from a slope as the artist is seeking the prima materia of his art there. It rolls down and leaves in its trail a tiny, hardly visible trace that nonetheless engraves its image in the artist's memory. There it starts growing, becomes ever larger and develops into a pictorial topography that attains its final picture together with a second experience bound up firmly with the first one. With a lump of moist clay in his hand, Vosswinkel stands musing in his studio, bent over one of his canvases. Suddenly part of the clay slips out of the kneading hand and rolls over the picture, leaving an impressive trace. Thus the path to the work series of the "Rollfelder" (Runways) is irrevocably traced, and likewise the artist perceives clearly how to realize these works. A rolling ball will take the place of the painting brush.

Like the brush the ball comes in different sizes and degrees of hardness. Vosswinkel forms the balls from various types of earth which he sometimes mixes with pigments of colour. He crushes and grinds the mixture in a mortar and kneads and forms the balls with the help of water and a binding agent. Depending on the moisture of the balls and the intensity of their colour, the traces they leave on paper or canvas differ greatly. If surface and ball are rather dry the trace will become irregular and cracked. But if the surface is moist and the ball full of colour the traces will be thicker on both sides. The ball does not only assume the role of a brush but also that of a spatula. With the help of the ball the artist is able to lay on colour, but also to rub off colour just as the falling lump of clay formed its trace by carrying off pigments. In any case the traces that these balls leave always look different, they are never identical and have a signature-like appearance. Considering the traces' laconic character this is aesthetically highly appealing. It is primarily the reciprocity of recurrence and difference that provokes the onlooker's eye.

But even if Vosswinkel changes the medium of his artistic creation the aesthetic provocation does not become weaker for the onlooker. Besides the wide range of different balls the artist works with a variety of foam rubber rings cut for his needs in different sizes and formats from foam rubber rolls that are generally used in professional wall painting. In contrast to the often hesitant and groping impression of the ball-traces, the traces left by the rings appear resolute, determined, precise. The lines and structures produced by the rings always seem to show sections of precisely calculated ensembles. Depending on the choice of his medium Vosswinkel produces subjective or objective impressions as if he wished ironically to paraphrase the great controversy between informal and constructive art in the course of the last century. Of course, this only appears to be the case, as both pictures follow the same groping and experimental gesture as if it were the famous gradual fabrication of thought in the course of talking.

The same title "Rollfelder" for both works makes it clear that they belong to the same kind of picture as writing may belong to the same sort of text. To put the necessary order into his extensive production the artist simply numbers the single works, and in doing so the two first numbers always refer to the year when the work has been created. Beside the different gesture of the traces, changing formats and surfaces differentiate Vosswinkel's works. The artist works with canvas, paper and acrylic glass. Sometimes he joins two painted glass plates to form one picture. The doubling has the effect that the complex lines and structures become even more complex. They lead to a sort of spatial effect and the picture becomes a pictorial object (for example "Rollfeld 99108"). In a certain sense a similar effect may be noticed with only one glass plate when its lines and traces are reflected by light, like shadows on the wall behind it (as with "Rollfeld 99128").

Here we come to another important element of differentiation: the way in which the trace invades the pictorial surface. In addition to the all over, when layers and structures of lines cannot be followed or solved any more and look like a rhizome or a Gordian knot projected onto the picture's surface, there is the solitary, lonely line whose course can be easily followed by the eye. It is unnecessary to say that it is accompanied by monochrome sublimity versus polychrome sensuality. While its economical gesture looks pure and cathartic, the labyrinth of lines pulls the onlooker's gaze into a visual turmoil where it threatens to drown. Yet the presumed optical mastering of the lonely line is also only an illusion, an impression that has already been preluded by its shadowy alter ego. The ambiguity that is thus given is further reinforced by the impression of a microscopic or cellular structure that is only given to us as a fragment. Only beyond the borders of the picture will it be completed and become a whole that nevertheless remains unknown to us.

It does not matter how many traces the artist paints and puts on top of each another! Whether it be only a lonely trace or twelve layers of traces, the picture is no longer a window on the world. Or in quite another sense, as meant by Alberti. It is the world seen as a simile. This simile given by the picture reflects the complexity of a world that as a whole withdraws more and more from our comprehension, that we only manage to grasp partly and do not understand completely. If one looks very closely at Vosswinkel's works this dimension is revealed by another difference. The gesture of the pictures is either concentric or excentric. Concentric means that the lines remain within the framework of the picture while the excentric work surpasses these borders. The concentric works do not allow us to perceive either the beginnings or the ends of the lines which represent a sort of closed system that cannot be deciphered in its baroque, circular and labyrinthine growth (compare "Rollfeld 99235").

On the contrary, the excentric works show an open system that cannot be understood either. They provide not a whole, but only fragments, and thus signatures that are highly characteristic of our time (see "Rollfeld 99234") That this basic blindness in relation to the sense of a whole does not have to lead to depression is made clear by the featherlight texture and the optmistic colours of Vosswinkel's pictures as well as by the artist's performances and installations that he did in the context of the ball medium. In 1997 the artist constructed a runway out of 1414 small balls of earth and turmeric, a spice from India. The whole established a loose, but well organized structure as clear and constructive as Vosswinkel's rubber foam traces. Then the artist stepped with bare feet, cautious, but determined, into the rows of balls in order to confuse and disorder its order with the help of gentle but firm kicks. This, too, was a mixture of planning and accident no different from the ball guided by the artist's hand across the paper in both a circling and searching movement. During the second performance Vosswinkel allowed himself to be guided on his walk across the rows of balls by calls, questions and comments from the audience.

Another work from the same year places the initiative even further in the hands of the public. Forty balls made of sand and concrete are placed at the disposal of the people's creative power and will. Their diameter is 46 centimetres and their surface also bears the traces of the honey-coloured and nourishing turmeric. Man in his role of homo ludens and homo artisticus assumes the task with pleasure. In ever-new constellations the people create for themselves an image of the human condition which is determined by indetermination, whose only constant factor is change, whose only certitude is uncertainty and whose dignity consists of accepting exactly this condition with courage.

Michael Stoeber - Translation: Hugh Langridge/Michael Stoeber