Seeing

Going in circles is not yet proof of movement.

For years I have been trying to find out what a painting can still be today. I don't have the answer. You can't think it up at a desk either. You can only paint it and watch what happens. The reason for that has less to do with art than you would think.

The drive was the same from the start. I wanted to widen consciousness. That sounds large, but it is meant simply: to see more than one is used to seeing.

We all assume that seeing is receiving. Out there is the world, in here is a picture of it, and the picture is roughly right. Nobody says this assumption out loud. It doesn't look like an assumption either. It looks like the ground you stand on.

It is not ground. Anyone can test this on themselves, sober, in a minute.

In every eye there is a place without sensory cells. There is a hole in your field of vision. You have never seen it, because it isn't black. It gets filled in. Not overlooked: produced.

Colour isn't out there either. Out there are waves, and they have no colour. Red only comes into being in you.

And if two lines of equal length are arranged so that one looks longer, you can measure them as often as you like. You will go on seeing them as different. The knowledge never arrives at the seeing.

Every night you also build an entire world. With space, with weight, with other people. In a dream everything is completely convincing. And none of it was there.

The reason is simple. Perception is not built to be right. It is built to work. Whoever reacts fast enough survives. Whoever waits until the picture is complete does not. Right and useful come apart in the process.

So what we call reality is a working surface. It gets us through the day well. It gives no guarantee that we are seeing the thing itself. Another word for it is interface: the place where two things touch that don't have to know each other.

If that is true, then many rules we take for rules of reality are rules of the surface. Letting go does not mean that nothing is true any more. It means: to stop taking the surface for the ground.

It feels like losing. After every step something is missing that gave you a hold a moment ago. But what falls away was never property. It was a habit.

Whether there is a unity at the bottom of everything, I don't know. Nobody can decide that. The only certainty is that the separation we start from is not a fact. It belongs to the surface. Which is why what you are afraid of losing is the same thing that stands at the end of letting go. It doesn't arrive later. It was there the whole time.

I can't say any of this. Language describes, and every description pushes a content in front of it. An argument convinces but changes nothing. See the two lines.

Some people know this not from books. They have had states in which the surface briefly failed to hold. Under anaesthesia, in deep quiet, at a turning point, some in intoxication. They don't come back with a proof, they come back shaken. And then they tell you what they saw. That is exactly what sounds implausible, and rightly so, because the content proves nothing. What mattered was not the content. What mattered was that the surface was briefly visible as a surface. That can't be told. So such reports end up filed under anecdote, and the thought ends up there with them.

A painting can do something else. It doesn't describe. It puts a seeing in front of you, and then the seeing happens on you.

That is why I leave three things out.

I paint no figures, no beings, nothing that can be named. The moment a thing is in the picture, recognition kicks in. Then you no longer see, you only identify. The surface has to stay empty so that seeing itself becomes visible.

I paint no horizon. That leaves no standpoint. The spaces cannot be resolved. Anyone who tries to read them gets a depth that the next glance overturns again. The eye receives every signal for space. Only the resolution it does not receive. A space that works without existing.

And I paint no light that comes from outside. The light comes out of the picture. Colour without a model, glow without a source. Nothing points outwards any more, because inside the picture there is no outside.

What remains is a trace. My paintings do not show what is there. They show that something has passed through. Whatever they hold has long since left the picture.

While painting, I am the observer. As long as I am standing there, everything is decided on me. What stays, what disappears, when it is enough. In that moment the painting settles.

Then I stop and walk away.

Later someone else stands in front of it, and I am no longer there. The observer on whom the painting settled is missing. And with that the painting is open again.

I think here of the double-slit experiment. Single particles are sent at a wall with two slits. If nobody measures which slit they go through, a striped pattern appears behind it, as though every particle had gone through both. If you do measure, the pattern disappears. Then each particle behaves like a thing that took one path.

By observer, physicists mean any measurement and not a consciousness, I know that. I take it as an image and not as proof. But the image is exact about what I mean. As long as measurement happens, something settles. Without the measurement, several possibilities stay open.

A finished painting is therefore not a message from me to you. It is a place that opens anew each time someone stands in front of it.

I know how my paintings look from outside. Strong colour, visible gesture, no object, luminosity. There is a full shelf of categories for that. It is called psychedelic, cosmic, visionary, science fiction, sometimes digital. Further back stand the art-historical compartments: lyrical abstraction, gestural abstraction, colour field painting, neo-expressionism, Neue Wilde, op art, the sublime, romanticism, zombie formalism, post-internet. There is a compartment for everything. The sorting needs no looking, only features, and after two seconds it is done.

This doesn't annoy me, it is simply instructive. That gaze too is built for usefulness and not for truth. It wants to open a drawer quickly and stow a certainty away, so as not to lose its bearings. Seeing what is the case takes longer. So it does precisely what this whole text is about.

And in doing so it mistakes vocabulary for grammar. This painting uses a few words from that corner and not a single one of its sentences. Over there, states are illustrated. Over there is a beyond that gets reported on, and the colour describes an experience. With me there is nothing to report. No experience, no beyond, no message. What looks like a heightened seeing is a seeing without an object.

I don't only look at pictures. The right is growing stronger, in almost every country, and what I mainly see there are people afraid of changes they cannot control. The climate is tipping, and we treat that as a matter of opinion. An economy that can only grow is eating up the foundations it lives on. And war is being waged without interruption.

I have no explanation for this. Nor do I trust any that is offered to me. But I recognise in all of it a movement I know from painting.

Whoever takes an order for reality has to defend it. Every change is then an attack. And whoever feels attacked becomes hard. That is how most of what people do to each other begins. Not with malice. With fear of loss, and mostly with the fear of having to give up a habit that gave security.

This belongs to no side. It happens everywhere someone believes they know the ground. Among those who take themselves for the good ones as well. With me as well.

With the climate something else comes in that has to do directly with seeing. Our perception is built for what is close, fast and has a face. A danger that is slow, distributed and faceless never even arrives at this apparatus. We don't only deny it. We simply don't see it. That is not a character flaw, that is the construction. You can only compensate for it if you know you have it.

And an economy that lives on attention is no accident. It has understood how this apparatus works, and it aims exactly at its weakest point. It is the most precise evidence so far that perception is built for usefulness and not for truth. Only it uses that against us.

I am writing this at a time when machines make pictures. You type in a sentence and get a view nobody has ever seen, of something that doesn't exist. It convinces immediately. People call it artificial intelligence.

For painting this is no threat. It is more like a confirmation.

These systems are apparatuses that build a world out of probabilities. They work superbly without knowing the thing itself. That is exactly what I claim about our perception. We have now built a second one, outside ourselves, and we can watch it at work.

In the process something is lost that was taken for granted for a long time. A picture used to be proof. If a photograph showed something, then it was there. That no longer holds. Seeing and believing are now coming apart in public and not only in philosophy.

That is why I think we are stuck in a transition. Transitions feel the way they feel because the surface stops holding. What was self-evident yesterday no longer holds today, and nobody knows what takes its place. That is exhausting, and it demands more of us than we are used to.

In such times there are two movements. The one grips tighter. It looks for an order that looks like ground again, and defends it. That is the louder of the two right now.

The other looks at what is actually in the way. That is the more uncomfortable one, because the obstacle is never outside. It lies in what you are holding on to. And looking at that is almost always the hardest thing available in the moment. Not because it hurts, but because for a moment you have no ground.

I think we have to get through this together and that there is no shortcut.

A painting can't do that and doesn't want to. It is a surface calculated for nothing, because nobody has to look at it. Painting matters today not because it shows more than a screen. It matters because it wants less.

I know how it sounds when a painter writes something like this. A painting ends no war. It lowers no emissions. It convinces nobody who doesn't want to be convinced. I am clear about that, and I don't want to make it bigger than it is.

What I can offer is smaller. Perhaps it is still not little.

Everything I have described up to here comes down to a single ability. To be able to revise your picture without losing yourself in the process. That is at bottom a political ability. A society that can't do it becomes hard. A person who can't do it does too.

And this ability can be practised. Not with arguments, they change nothing, see the two lines. But by putting yourself in situations where your own perception corrects itself in front of you and you notice that you survive it.

A painting is such a situation. It costs nothing. It demands nothing. You stand in front of it, the space tips, recognition finds no hold, and you are fine while it happens. That is the exercise. First where it is cheap. Then perhaps in the places where it is expensive.

I don't think time has only one direction. If the sequence too belongs to the surface, then later and now are not as separate as it feels.

For my work that doesn't mean it is ahead of its time. That would be a consolation charged to the future, and the future can't be relied on. It means something simpler. My paintings are contemporaneous with their time. It happens now or not at all. Here, in front of the painting, in the few minutes someone stands there.

That is the difference between an announcement and an enactment. An announcement points to a future in which it will be redeemed. An enactment takes place or it doesn't.

I don't claim that I succeed at this. Nor do I have any claim to pulling it off. I only believe that the attempt itself is already the thing. You can't want to achieve it and then have it. You can only do it.

And that is why painting holds. Not because it stands outside time. Nothing stands there. But because it can be repeated. A painting does not expire. It waits. And every time someone stands in front of it, it happens again.

Timeless does not mean: outside time. Timeless means: any time.

There is one thing I cannot prove, and I trust it all the same. Letting go of security is the real answer to fear and not its opposite. A security that has to be defended keeps producing new fear. Whoever lets go loses nothing they really had. My paintings have no message. Ambassadors for that they would gladly be.