Exhibition with objects by Beatriz von Eidlitz and Florian Lechner

Metamorphoses – transformations: What has been transformed? What is to be transformed?

The paintings and objects we see in this exhibition have emerged from processes of transformation. Their raw materials are elementary: iron –rags – sand. In addition, water and fire as media, which set the transformation into motion.

First: iron, rags and water.

Beatriz von Eidlitz prepares iron plates: color pigments, metal stencils, old nails, saw blades, plastic rings are arranged into compositions to form structures and patterns atop the plates. This is the one aspect, the weighty half of the transformation process. In addition, there is also the lightweight, liquid half: torn cotton fabric is ground into the tiniest pieces, mixed with water to form a pulp – paper pulp, which is scooped from a tub with a sieve frame and laid atop the prepared iron plate. What happens next remains invisible: the actual transformation process happens in the concealment. The water in the paper pulp reacts with the iron, rust eats into the solid surface, the solid metal becomes volatile, everything starts to float, so to speak, discolors, reacts with each other. The solid structures and colors move downward into the metal, which becomes porous, and upward into the slowly drying paper mass. After a few days, the dried paper sheet is pulled off – then two images appear, related like mirror images, yet different: one image is on the iron plate, the other on the coarse-grained paper. On both, we see traces of a process of transformation in which conscious design and accidental events interpenetrate. Creativity and patience, activity and waiting, action and passion are mutually dependent. The traces of this event seem like traces of life itself – rusty lines of bizarre beauty, luminous color, breathing metal.

Sand and fire are the starting ingredients in the production of glass. Florian Lechner works with glass that has already been melted from sand and is uncommonly pure and colorless. The glass is heated, drawn over molds, pressed, bent, superimposed, and colors are added. When it cools, air bubbles and fractures can appear, streakiness or cloudiness. The shaped glass doesn’t only allow the light to shine through it like a windowpane: the light shimmers, is refracted and shaped. The large bowl absorbs light, emits light, focuses it, makes it resound. Its shape is open toward the top; fullness and emptiness are equally possible.

Shimmering glass, iron rust, luminous color:

What can we see?

Floating planets, passing by as if in a dream, spinning. Flying crates, each in search of a place in the universe – what yearnings sail through space in them? Behind them, the wall becomes three-dimensional and draws the eye into this visual game. Iron plates change their sizes, puff up, contract; volcanoes erupt, a green leaf unfolds. Enlarged micro-worlds glow in brilliant colors – pulsating cell structures. Are these dangerous bacteria or blood cells that rush through the veins? Perhaps also single-celled organisms, teeming life?

Greenish-blue water flows through oceanic depths, light refracts in reds and blues, a tautly stretched sail shows the direction – every space is expansible, nothing stands still, and ships could sail in the large bowl. Black light shines through the entire length of a corridor: a single word would be enough to fill it. White light moves, dancing around a glass bowl in everchanging figures.

Finally, the shape of the viewer becomes visible, his or her own face is reflected in the glass. Only at second glance does one realize what is depicted in the large-format photos behind it. Perhaps, after this second look, one’s own surprise and transformation also becomes visible in the mirror image.

Susanne Erhard Rein (June 29, 2011)

Metamorphoses, United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany, Bischof-Meiser-Strasse 6, Pullach, from June 30 to September 23, 2011, Mon to Fri, 9 am to 12.30 pm and Mon to Thu, 2 to 4.30 pm. Introduction: Dr Susanne Ehrhard-Rein.

Taking an overview of the work of Beatriz von Eidlitz, one sometimes feels as though one has been spirited away to a chamber of curiosities where one’s eyes are tickled by a profusion of allusions. One encounters the vibrant presence of colorful pigments, the earthy depth of rust particles and dark hues, and lively surface structures which look as though they had been created by natural forces only moments before. One is also confronted by eminent accuracy and precise calculation in the placement of formal motifs and accents, and in the positioning of picture-objects within the surrounding spaces. Freedom, chance and play unite with form-giving intention to create a compositional principle that’s adventurous in the best sense.

What kind of visual world, what repertory of forms and motifs does Beatriz von Eidlitz continually strive to enlarge? Individually, her artworks are frequently characterized by decisive earnestness. Many could be substantial signs or symbols, yet their meanings remain open and unresolved, their significance conveyed through the moods they generate. Modernism, of course, has loosened the hold that meanings once held on things and symbols, and the standards of measurement by which art is viewed experienced a similar manumission soon afterwards. The value of mood has ranked among perception’s most essential keys ever since, all the more so amidst today’s surfeit of medial phenomena. Beatriz von Eidlitz needn’t expressly focus on these altered relationships of perception to make it clear that she traverses this territory along paths which are uniquely her own. Against their midnight black background, her “Monde” (“Moons”) on their six-meter-long panel radiate a magical intensity, just as the moon always has, but here Luna appears in threefold variations and scoffs at the laws of celestial mechanics by rolling through the space of the picture. Urgency encounters an ironic awareness of demystification, yet neither divests the other of substance.

“My pictures’ ancestors are here,” the artist said on a journey through the colorful rocky landscape of Quebrada de Humahuaca in northwestern Argentina. “But these are distant ancestors. So much lies between.”

Her artworks aren’t merely the simple results of impressions gleaned during a journey. Rather, they are manifestations of the pictorial potency of desired places which this artist admired in her youth and never forgot, which slowly settled to the seafloor of her memory, and provided orientation and influenced decisions for all that came afterwards. As a child with her parents, and later as a young woman, Beatriz von Eidlitz traveled through these landscapes, as well as through Patagonia and nearly all other regions of Argentina. She left the country as an art student in 1979, during the reign of the military dictatorship, and continued studying art in Europe. Her interest in handmade rag-based paper led her in the mid 1980s to the paper-mill in Bad Grosspertholz, Waldviertel, Austria, where she began working with handmade paper, first sculpturally, later in pictorial form. This developed into nothing less than the invention of a new technique which might be called “The BvE Process.” Sheets of iron, pigments and handsieved paper are the essential ingredients, and oxidation (i. e. rusting) is the crucial process through which these elements interact. All unorthodox materials have their own special symbolism, so what occurs here involves archetypical materials from human history. But only incidentally: although Beatriz von Eidlitz loves the form-giving opportunities, she makes neither a fetish of them nor a cult of her materials. She understands herself not as a painter, but as a sculptor. This self-assessment might seem surprising if one’s gaze were focused only on her picture-objects; but if one considers her method of working, then her self-image as sculptor instantly makes perfect sense. Sheets of iron, pigments and paper pulp are brought together, sometimes gently, sometimes forcibly. Their juxtaposition ultimately “develops” in a process that combines calculated forethought, random chance and physical influences. This interplay creates the fascinating textures of her artworks. “The polarity of liveliness, plan and accident, reveal themselves in the intermeshing of composition and texture, in the transparency of the form, and onward to the unformed,” she says.

As noted above, a tremendous diversity of formal motifs distinguishes Beatriz von Eidlitz’s work. She is assuredly not one of those artists who erect their oeuvres as monolithic monuments to their own styles. Many different chambers coexist in the mansion of her imagination. Hers is a deliberately chosen freedom, but not that alone: when Hans Belting proclaimed “the end of art history” in 1995, he meant that art goes on, but under altered conditions. In Beatriz von Eidlitz’s work, as in the work of some other artists, this manifests itself in the awareness that a contemporary artist’s intention can scarcely be to devise wholly new forms and contents. Instead, the accent is placed more strongly than ever on the evolution of new modes of expression, on reflection, and on the further processing of the collections in the grand cultural archive. “Weltenlexikon” (“Lexicon of the Worlds”) is the ironic title of an older piece with which she waggishly pays homage to this situation. The freedom to explore diversity enriches Eidlitz’s oeuvre with a well-furnished archive of forms, found objects and new inventions. Archive? How could we call it an archive, when these artworks are so vibrantly lively and energizing! A poetic abstraction of reality determines the pictorial conceptions here.

Despite her unprecedented combinations of materials, Beatriz von Eidlitz actually works in a very classical manner, albeit in entirely her own way. An utterly nonnegotiable intensity, passion and formal decisiveness indwell her artworks. This is true not only of the pictorial objects, which, thanks to their clear and direct formal idiom, are endowed with a certain mightiness that never makes them seem heavy. Surprisingly, it’s also true of motifs which are closely related to the sphere of pop culture, yet never directly quoted from that world. This is why, their extraordinary variety notwithstanding, Beatriz von Eidlitz’s works always possess an unmistakable character. And it is also why they assert themselves in the field of medial and artistic pictorial production with a bravura that is uniquely and distinctly their own.

Eberhard Falcke (2007)

"The crazy suicide 
passed by and 
returned the water of colors 
to nature; 
but who will 
return it to him?”
Antonin Artaud: “Van Gogh, 
the man suicided by 
society.".

One of the revolutionary changes that Homo faber set in motion by subjecting nature to his purposes is the discovery of paper; another is that of metal. Paper changed the world so drastically that someone could write that the whole universe could be found in a library. Metal too, once it was brought out of the earth and artificially processed, was altered and falsified. This led to the adage in many languages: “All that glitters is not gold.” The decay expressed in rusting iron has often been described on paper as the bliss of dissolution and the escape from civilization’s manacles. But beyond this, rust in the work of Beatriz von Eidlitz becomes a way to feel color. The border between the natural and the artificial manifests itself in rust, which is the ruddy product of retribution, the revenge that nature demands by for the fact that man has stolen from stone and manipulated it. Along this border, the artist creates a world where abstraction and extreme emotionality are the only legitimate forms of language, a realm where content and form fuse, where textures are magical expressions, deceptive faces, born from chaos, breaking through the extreme peace of pure form.

As a daughter of her era, this artist refuses to rob the colors from nature. But her world of white and black is open to the intrusion of a memory of color that embraces all hues: rust. In this universe, rust is the chromatic representation of an organic and inorganic process, from white to black, from birth to death. It is the gesture of the autumn of existence; today, and perennially; in each individual life and in the whole of humanity.

The rust of iron, as a form of decay of human technologies, is only the remembrance of the rust of organic nature. The leaf of a tree reveals all colors in the course of time; it transforms and is taken back into the process of life, through all deaths. Rust relentlessly and comprehensively reminds us of all the colors that exist and could be lost forever. Abstraction delights us with its forms and the memory of color, while simultaneously expressing a tragedy that is free from any time-bound drama or interpretation, because it occurs not only today, but is and has always been the dilemma of man. The artist shows a limit, a difficulty, and she overcomes the dilemma by transforming it into a boundless universe, where form is both expression and means, where rust is not only an object to stimulate visual perception, but also as an impulse to catalyze memory and free association.

Marta Binetti on the exhibition “Oxidations,” FORAUM Gallery, Munich (1990)