Marvin Altner

in: Neue Kunst in den Neuen Kammern!, Ausstellungskatalog, Hg. Ellen Kobe und Marvin Altner, Jovis Verlag, Berlin 2008

ritardando

Each room in the Neue Kammern (New Chambers), from small domestic spaces to the Jaspis Salon, because of their size, form, material and lighting, provides differing preconditions for the visitors' perception of them. The richness of design that can be experienced within the individual salons and guest rooms, as well as the potentially increased enhancement of viewing the total as a sequence, proves to be very challenging for many visitors, and this is also often combined with a limitation arising from the ability to perceive either only individual details from an abundance thereof, or the whole as only an atmosphere. When artists conceive works that add further elements to the existing design of these spaces, the reoccurring question is, will this not merely increase the existing abundance and thus weaken the experience.

Elisabeth Sonneck has addressed this question and, as will be demonstrated, has found an answer, in which opposites continue to exist in harmony. Her works for the floor of the Ovid Salon entitled ritardando, are oil paintings on fluorescent red Plexiglas, which formally and proportionally reproduce exactly the historic green serpentinite and white marble tiles. Changes between full and half panels, as well as between panels and gaps of the same size, lead to an appearance of open patterning; however, the alignment of edges with the existing tiles immediately imprints their rhomboid shapes on the viewer's mind.

In any case, the design of ritardando makes an effective shift: the panels do not centre on the individual rhomboid shapes but on the crossing diagonals that appear when focusing on the central rectangle between four adjoining rhomboids. Thereby in Sonneck's work the emphasis is no longer on the surface area of the rhomboids, as on the floor of the Ovid Salon, but the lines' crosses created by the adjoining edges of the rhomboids. These differences may also be expanded in relationship to the materials used. The historic floor tiles are solid plates, laid together as a flat surface. Sonneck's panels, in contrast, are thin, lightweight rectangles, which even within the floor installation do not lose their pictorial character. Their pictorial quality testifies to the strength of the colour.

In contrast to cloth, Plexiglas resists the application of oil paint in smooth strokes, the paint creates streaks and bubbles. Only when applied extremely lightly and gently does the oil paint dry in the form of a stripe. The more layers applied, the better the adhesion and the denser and deeper the still transparent surface becomes. The 'retarding' in the paintings' title initially refers to the picture panels' extended production time. A depth of surface is created through repeatedly applying layers of paint, a process affecting the viewer. Different nuances of colour between the individual fields, the fine irregularities in the paint texture through the manual application of paint and the depth of colour arising from the process of glazing form an area which both embraces - and decelerates - the viewer's gaze.

The Ovid Gallery is an elongated salon measuring almost 20 metres whose regular spacing of floor tiles, gilded wall reliefs and windows communicates an impression of openness and spaciousness. Visitors typically stroll straight through it to arrive in the Jaspis- or Buffet Salon. The straightness of the colonnade is contrasted by Elisabeth Sonneck in a composition of in total 40 panels, which she arranges asymmetrically, and so directs the viewer's steps along a softly snaking line. Without interfering with the order of the museum, she lends the direct passage a dynamic, a distant echo of the figures danced in the ballrooms of the 18th Century.

Looking at the individual panels as well as the composition of the panels as a whole and even more so by shifting the gaze between the two, it becomes apparent, how a slight change of colour, a minimal heightening of the level of the floor and a deviation from the direct passage through the salon may at a second glance influence the space's atmosphere and heighten awareness concerning the differences. So on the one hand the composition of the panels appears to be integrated into the space, because in her arrangement the artist refers to the 'paths of light' that occur when sunlight falls through the windows reaching down to the floor and is reflected in the mirrors opposite, and on the other hand she diverges from the space's natural rhythm by not installing the composition centrally but slightly misaligned.

This deviation is paralleled in two aspects by the painting process involved in the individual panels. The endings of the crossed lines meet the edges to the right of the corners, so that an effect of minimal rotation occurs, and also in relationship to the colour, even though the green-white triangles refer to the colour of the floor tiles, they simultaneously unfold their own tones. All facets of the composition aim at balancing out the work in the spatial context whilst keeping it open at the same time. Viewing it over time, an impression of a dynamic interrelationship of individual shapes, colours and the compositional context unfolds, which does not, however, remain fixed. The sensation of the composition hovering above the floor as a result of the fluorescent coloured edges of the panels, can be understood as a metaphorical invitation to the viewers to perceive the individual characteristics of ritardando as a network of interrelated references.

Sonneck sees a chance here of a self-determined and emphatic appropriation of spaces and artworks: "By means of space-related painting I would like [...] to work towards situations where a perception of colour occurs not only optically, vis-à-vis, but in a direct combination of location, time and the interacting person, in that the colour no longer only appears 'in front of the eyes' of the viewer, but the viewer moves in this spatial environment and, according to the individual's position as well as the angle and duration of view, creates their own momentary and fluctuating visual field." (Elisabeth Sonneck, comments on Löscharbeit, 2008). In this concept, the unconditional subjectivity of artistic sensations and actions are ideally combined with the subjectivity of a viewer, who is prepared to seize upon the possibility of unlocking a closed historic spatial ensemble and merging it into a new, unknown whole.

Translation: Tim Beeby and Sabine Bürger