|
In Leonardo da Vinci's "Trattato della pittura" there is an oft-cited and much commented section which I feel would make an appropriate beginning to these reflections on Wolfgang Ohlhäuser's oeuvre: "I would not wish to neglect enriching this outline with a new way of seeing that can help to produce all sorts of inspiration. The method consists of looking at a wall covered with patches, or the structures of stone. Should you have some situation or other to invent, you can see things there that resemble varying landscapes, complete with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, large plains, valleys and hills of all kind. And you can see all manner of battles, the lively positions of strange figures, facial expressions, costumes and innumerable things which you can imbue with a perfect form." At a later point, he continues: "It is a fact that confused and indefinite things inspire the mind to invent the new.
Wolfgang Ohlhäuser does not fire his imagination by studying alleged stains on walls or seams in stone, but rather himself invents the sources of inspiration. He applies paint onto a grounding which he has often prepared in many stages, and then transforms it into highly diverse patterns by peeling off layers across large sections of the canvas or in specific zones. Since color consistency, how dry the paint has become, intensity and (occasionally rotated) direction of course influence the character of the underlying structure, it is only partly possible to talk of an arbitrary composition. At any rate, the first stage of the picture production only comes under deliberate control to a certain degree. And it is this specifically that lends it the openness which stirs intuition, and makes it a rich font for all subsequent steps. And at this point, Leonardo's guide can be applied almost verbatim since these steps involve re-interpreting the abstract structures in landscape formations, articulating the indeterminate in order to render it more recognizable, transforming the lack of distinct colors into chromatic diversity. All of this does not simply entail converting the unformed into the familiar, but rather exploratory journeys into a region shaped more by the imagination than the sense of reality. Ohlhäuser creates utopian landscapes - landscapes in which the abstract morphs into the familiar and the familiar mutates into the fantastic. These are the landscapes of dreams or which one sometimes imagines as alternatives held up as a foil to the real world.
Ohlhäuser's imagination is fed by three sources: firstly travel experiences, secondly his occupation with other painters which range from Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel the Elder via Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau through to Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí, thirdly meditations that serve to focus and concentrate the images produced by the imagination. Since 1960 Ohlhäuser has traveled to increasingly remote areas - first to Italy, France and Spain, then to Turkey and Egypt, and finally to India, Nepal, Tibet, Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, Sumatra, Java and Bali. He visited remote villages and monasteries often under far from safe conditions, hiked along mountain paths in the Himalaya, lived with farmers or monks. What drove him and continues to drive him is not a form of religion rooted in a specific denomination, but rather his belief that all things have an inner soul, a belief that might better be referred to as animistic rather than pantheistic, and which is expressed in certain regional adaptations of Buddhism. The inner eye is always involved in your view of the world, providing there is a willingness for introspection or to immerse yourself in your own inner world: It perceives signs of life in things which remain elusive to the intellect, and discovers mystic connections that can be described in terms of images, yet cannot be named.
In many of Ohlhäuser's landscapes fantasy is almost overwhelmingly present, but even in works which the artist primarily considers testanments to his travels, you occasionally encounter mysterious figures concealed in puzzling images, hallucinatory physiognomies assigned to mountains or stones, not to mention wondrous dwellings. If you ask him about the background to these elements, Ohlhäuser happily informs you that as soon as he concentrates on reality this is how he imagines it to be, making any further questions quite superfluous. The artist is not interested in providing an explanatory theory, at least not where iconographic elements are concerned. This is not the case with regard to his painting technique. It is quite obvious that as a material object the painting has both a systematic and careful composition, and that underlying this composition is a profound familiarity with historical painting techniques. Once again Ohlhäuser employs a method first described by Leonardo da Vinci: Onto the afore-mentioned basic monochrome strurcture, often produced using dark colors, he mainly applies glazes which thus has a strangely immaterial effect that not only produces a general transparent appearance, but also heightens the feeling that we are part of a fairytale. Iridescent veils extend over the objects, hazy light softens the contrasts. For the base coat Ohlhäuser employs casein distemper, for the subsequent layers varying concentrations of resinous glazes and tempera. Only at first sight does the fact that the artist likes to achieve the structure of the lower layers with the aid of frottage as promulgated by Max Ernst run counter to the miniaturist treatment of the final layers.
Ohlhäuser's palettes are amazingly rich in spectrum - in order to maintain a consistency that is easy to paint with, the twenty or so tempera and 130 resinous glazes on the two wooden palettes have to be replenished every few days or so. Likewise, he has a large collection of fine and extra fine brushes. Larger canvases are the results of months of work, and small formats also reveal in their diversity that time was not a limiting factor in their production. It is not for nothing that for years academies and universities in South and South-East Asia have invited Ohlhäuser to teach a technique that is virtually only to be learnt in Europe and America by people undergoing training in the art of restoration. Thanks to his workshops, many students have first became acquainted with the knowledge and skills exhibited by the grand masters of European painting.
Ohlhäuser loves the finely spread narration which invites you to use a magnifying glass. When he portrays unusual persons such as an old Tibetan mendicant or an old woman smoking opium, he remains the narrator who seeks to show every physiognomic detail and every little feature of the clothing. The striking realism of the portraits would point to the employment of photos, and indeed Ohlhäuser candidly admits that he indeed uses photographs but only for this category of paintings. On the other hand, the realistic features of the landscape pictures - early examples include "Crystalline Landscape" of 1977 and "Enchanted Landscape" of 1983; while later examples include "Garuda" from 1988, "Monsoon on Pearl River" from 1993 and "Aerial View of an Imaginary Landscape" of 2000 - merge to such an extent with the fantastic mood of the rest of the painting, that it hardly seems irrelevant to wonder about the degree to which genuine observations are included. Even in those works such as "Lamayuru Monastery, Ladakh, West Tibet", painted if 1987, in which magical references are less obvious, the first impression speaks for a generally meta-real outlook.
Ohlhäuser's professional career is as unorthodox as the world of his paintings. He trained in graphic design and largely taught himself his artistic skills. In 1970, it was pencil drawings he named "psychograms" with which he first came to attention - some were purchased by the Mannheimer Kunsthalle. The work he produced prior to this time already prove how skilled a hand this student and would-be graphic artist had and how he favored topics that thrived on the world of fantasy. On the "psychograms", relatively large-format pictures with an unmistakeable erotic touch, fragmentary biomorphous figures unite to form gentle textures. As colored and loosely composed works these "psychograms" continued through to the mid-1970s. But after this begins the phase of painting in which the principle of openness is reversed to become the principle of opulence, and it is doubtless the experience of the exotic world to which Ohlhäuser owes the style which was to become characteristic for him from that time onwards. Since then, he has varied and refined it, but has never substantially strangely.
The attempt to assign Ohlhäuser's art to some category within the system of current trends remains difficult for the very reason that expressions such as Fantastic Realism, Neo-Surrealism or Neo-Mannerism are not sufficiently precise and are too overused to serve as orientation aids. Many new versions of Surrealism suffer from something approaching iconographic interchangeability: The more mysterious the content is, the easier it is to replace it with some other mysterious content. In Ohlhäuser's work the enigmatic does not come across as artificial, but rather stems from a region of the personality in which the fantastic occupies a natural place. When you talk to the artist you never have the impression of speaking to a clever or even fanatical champion of an exotic subject - rather he is a friendly artist who treads the fine line between the different isms, concerned in a contemplative manner about the earth's future, sure of his feelings and for whom the world of the imagination represents the only reliable thing amongst the confusion of alleged reality.
Prof. Peter Anselm Riedl
Director for Contemporary Art History at the University of Heidelberg, (retd.)
|
