Matthias Weischer

Linking back to the tradition of classical painting, Matthias Weischer has rediscovered the interior as a theme for painting, using this most conventional of motifs as a sounding-board to explore thoroughly modern concerns. The largest work by the artist to come to auction, Familie 0 – Mittag, 2001, is a sovereign exploration of Weischer’s inexhaustible subject, which both mines the rich seam of the history of painting while concomitantly capturing the zeitgeist of his age. On the one hand an exercise in the purely formal concerns of Modernism, Familie O – Mittag simultaneously enshrines on canvas the atmosphere of disenchantment of a generation whose euphoric expectations at the reunification of Germany have stagnated into disillusionment and anomie.

Originally from Westphalia in West Germany, Weischer is one of a select few who, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, swam against the migratory tide and journeyed to the comparatively impoverished Leipzig in the East in search of a very traditional artistic training as it had been taught for centuries. Inspired by Rauch and the status conferred on him by the painting department in the Leipzig Academy, Weischer resisted the lure of the new media department and, clinging to his palette, tenaciously upheld the validity of the age-old medium. “In school we stuck together because the video and photography students looked down at us, they thought we were doing something boring” (the artist in Maura Egan, ‘The Talk; Neue School’ in Fashions of the Times Magazine, 19 September 2004).

While his peers looked to new media to express a new era, Weischer by contrast looked back to history, expressing deep interest in the epochs in which artists found new ways of seeing. Paradoxically, it is from within the strict conventions of 17^th-century Dutch painting that Weischer finds one of the most innovative and direct expressions of his own age.

In Familie O – Mittag, Weischer playfully addresses his historical predecessors. With its tiled flooring, stage-like space and light cascading in through a side window, the present work inevitably recalls the intricately composed interiors of Jan Vermeer. Constructed using single point perspective and a complex network of grids and vanishing points, Weischer uses the simple formal givens of horizontal and vertical axes as predicated by the Dutch master to engineer an innovative and complex spatial game. Shunning the art of the digital, Weischer paints his own virtual spaces, staggering abstract planes to conjure space. In Familie O – Mittag, what initially seems to be an uncomplicated, figurative depiction of space, on closer inspection proves to be constructed not of walls but of coloured planes. Surface ornamentation and the modulation of colour makes these different planes variously hover in space, vying against the retina in a simultaneity of figuration and abstraction. Like one of M.C. Escher’s trompe-l’oeuil compositions, positive and negative space jostle for supremacy. While the pot plants on the windowsill offer solace to the rational eye seeking to anchor the composition in some sense of reality, the vertical striped band down the right margin of the composition breaks any sense of the unity of the illusion of space. Likewise, the central snaking form grounded in the foreground, a direct quotation from Victor Willing, alternates between having three-dimensional volume and being a flat abstract colour field floating in space.

In the midst of the ostensible figurativeness of the scene, in Familie O – Mittag pure painterly gestures compel the eye to the surface, further disturbing spatial representation. In his unique creative process, Weischer builds layer upon layer of paint, allowing it to drip and splash down the canvas, adding now only to over-paint later. This process of overpainting and effacing previous layers can be seen as a potent metaphor for German history. In places pastose, elsewhere his application is dry, often laying bare previous forays and allowing an architectural insight into the construction of the picture. Through this technique, the surface unity of the picture plane is disrupted by the materiality of the paint: scratches, splashes of paint and the sgrafitto drawing of the underlayers intrude on the uppermost surface turning figuration into abstraction. As a consequence of the many layers of paint, the picture extends beyond the picture plane, becoming a tactile, sculptural object in its own right. Whereas in the 17^th century the polished surface of the canvas was conceptually imagined to be a transparent screen onto a pictorial world that was imagined behind it, in Weischer, by contrast, there is a disjunction between the formal and the conceptual unity of the image. It is in this balancing act between spatial illusion and the visibility of the means used to create it that Weischer’s innovation and skill reside.

Acutely aware of historicity in art, Weischer loads his compositions with temporal quotations and references, through which he conjugates Modernism. Thus, in the present work, we sense the presence of David Hockney, dramatically presaging Weischer’s tutelage with Hockney in 2005 in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. The construction of space, the colouration and the attention to ornamental surfaces and pattern recall Hockney’s interiors, such as Model with Unfinished Self-Portrait, 1977, in which the bedspread is quoted directly in Weischer's composition. The curtain to the right recalls Hockney’s curtains from the 1960s, while their rectilinear pattern recalls Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman. Meanwhile the pot plants are reminiscent of the defiantly figurative Lucien Freud and the floor tiles quote the rigorously Minimalist Carl André. Recontextualized, Victor Willing's Knot becomes a purely abstract form. Everywhere, a curtain, a lamp, a doorway becomes an ideal pretext for examining painterly phenomena and the history of art. Just like the 17^th-century Dutch masters, for Weischer the interior becomes a playground for experimentation, testing the limits and possibilities of the painterly means.

In 17^th-century Holland, the popularity of the interior as a motif in art was a symptom of the growing conflict between private and public, exterior and interior, the individual and society that ran parallel to the burgeoning bourgeoisie. On the one hand a pretext for narrative painting, on the other it was inevitably politicised. While for the Dutch masters the interior was a reflection of the individual, a projection of the inner, spiritual life of the artist into exterior space, for Weischer it is the projection of the collective inner-self of an entire post-Cold War generation. Imbued with a distinctly Leipziger air of unease and disillusionment, Familie O – Mittag, depicts a deserted, isolated  and sparsely furnished interior space whose rudimentary furnishings exude the underlying dreariness of standardised, mass-produced interior designs. In the absence of human presence there is a stillness evocative of a morning-after moment. As Arthur Lubow says, “A sour scent of curdled dreams seeps through the empty furnished rooms in Weischer’s paintings”, (Arthur Lubow, ‘The New Leipzig School’ in The New York Times, 8 January 2006) reflecting the shattered dreams and tarnished hopes of a generation duped into believing in the empty promises of the Capitalist alternative. Since the fall of the Wall, the social investment represented by the various reconstruction projects has proved to be castles in the air as unemployment and associated social problems are still rife. Having taken us on a journey through the annals of art history, therefore, in Familie O - Mittag Weischer delivers us at our final point of arrival: a frank and stark confrontation of the here and now.