SEVEN FOR A SECRET

UNIDENTIFIED AFRICAN LANDSCAPE

Painting as a trace of memory. A shadowed light blue, a burning red, a corrosive stripe of purple combine to a picture. Wessmann calls it KARIBA after the dam constructed between 1955 and 58 in the Sambezi valley. Behind this wall of concrete and steel lies a reservoir, that before the erection of the Assuan-dam at the upper nile was the largest dam of Africa, But Wessmann quotes neather the technical construction nor the topografic of the area or the prosperous wild- life whith has it`s habitat there. Wessmann shows colors, recalling what he has seen. These colors are echoes. Echoes of lasting impressions. As the title of the picture is not describing, but sounds like a mysterious formular recalling the place mentioned: KARIBA.

Experience of landscape, the light, the tones of rocks, the coloring of the vegetation show the visual inheritage mentioned by the artist. They deliver the pictures and color of the atmosphere, recalled in painting. The power and violence of boiling water masses forcing their way through narrow rocks could carry on  as a reminiscence in Wessmanns work like the charcoaled dead tree trunks appearing out of waste land after a bush fire. Mostly Zimbabwe and California are the regions recalled by Wessmanns colors. But it could be a long forgotten moment in the Britany or elsewhere, choosing the colors in paintings progress. In this respect Wessmanns painting is obliged to the informel. He considers the process of painting as a way to break the tight frame of notion and understands it as a possibility to reach areas of subconscience. In informal art pictures originate and rise out of color settings. Every brushstroke can become a release for associations and influence the following creative sequence. This indeed distinguishes Wessmanns procedures from informel, for the dialogue play between material and author is of minor importance for his work. Wessmanns primary interest is in color, and from this elemental and sensual interest in ocre or red, brown or blue the company with the pigmentious and oily mass results. In almost three-dimensional brushstrokes he delivers it on the canvas and emphazises over it`s physicality the color as color.

Furrowy, wingy, thick it stands on the painting ground. It is as color seizable, and in this capacity Wessmann inserts it. He paints alla prima- very decisive, energic. Mostly striking in the large sized pieces like KORALLENPALETTE, a loose arrangement of deep spatial, clearly bordered, detailed brushstrokes in themselves, or in LUX CONCAR-NEAU, a free from the britany harbour town Concarneau inspired paraphrasis, in which the french national colors, mirroring atlantic lights and the blue of the sea seem to penetrate each other. To this same kind DONAU-SCHULE belongs, a hommage to the intense sealed shining of the paintings of artists like Albrecht Altdorfer or Wolf Huber. The concentrated coloring of pictures like Hubers „Beweinung Christi“(1) or Altdorfers plates „Heilige Nacht“ (2) and „Auferstehung Christi“ (3) stimulating Wessmann directly to DONAUSCHULE, is the historic pendant to the often glowing color-effects Wessmann reaches in his paintings. But there is a fundamental difference: While the south german renaissance artists usually constructed  their pictures in layers, Wessmann uses defined color settings. A once placed brushstroke stayes like it is. It won`t be modified in itself but possibly new located or weighted through following settings. It can move now into the background because through the altered pictoral context a gains more importance. Under this point of view Wessmanns pieces are close to radical painting, occupated exclusive with color and it`s sensual effects.

Painting is the constance in the work of Wessmann. He has always painted, but he has not always shown this part of his artistic practice. In the Nineties, after studying with Harry Kögler in Karlsruhe and after a fellowship at Arnulf Rainer in Vienna Wessmann mostly developed conceptual projects. A similar cut Dieter Krieg once did: Only after having lectured and taped the about 150,000 names of artists registered in the 37 volumes of the Thieme-Becker (4) Krieg found his way back to the argument with color, brush and canvas. On his side Wessmann reflected in plans and installation work the social and political reality of a through aggressive economic liberalism and progressive globalisation characterised presence. He certainly occupies himself with the situation of the african continent, which his family on his mother`s side, located for many generations in the country now known as Zimbabwe, regards as their real home. So he thematises for example with a series in several pieces the aids problem and the in the west often cynical reaction to see the virus infection aids as a natural method against the population explosion. Wessmann showed the shape of Africa supported by maps of of mostly rural german regions. These designs serve a sad statistic: Fictive numbers of births are opposed to numbers of deaths, equalising eachother until the situation tips over to the result, that there are suddenly only deaths. The name of the piece is Dying By Numbers.

From Africa the artist also brought a nursery rhyme ending with Five for silver/ Six for gold/ Seven for a secret/ Never to be told. Wessmann noted these verses on a school-blackboard like picture, but they could as well be the merry assumption of his Selfinstructions to avoid production, a compilation of concepts he confirmed between 1995 and 1998 in a kind of hand-made form. Through this explicit hint at the non- realisation of the detailed described intensions Wessmann questions with his designs the conditions of contemporary art production. He even does a further step and negotiates- at least by attempt- the possibilaty to make a statement of asthetic value taken seriously, not to talk about becoming important in the end of the twentieth century. It was planned to weld the Selfinstructions to avoid production into a steelbox with the instruction to open it only after a hundred years.

Seven for a secret: The artist packs his belongings and closes them away. This stepping back is not escape, it is the necessary distance: Considered with some distance things grow clearer. This intension lies underneath Wessmanns unfigurative paintings. The motive is color. As in radical painting it deals with activating color, color-experience and presence. But unlike to there in Wessmanns pieces the color is combined to memories. When he names his pictures AFRICAN SUNSET or EAT SUN real african sunsets are meant, which he might thought of during the progress of his work. Even the methodical vicinity to an informel, that, psychic or out of memory, recalls found objects through painting is apparent, because Wessmann does not stick to indefinite shapes of an uncertain inwardlyness. His colors correspond to real situations. Even if he, like in UNIDENTIFIED AFRICAN LANDSCAPE cannot exactly localize the landscape it still exists- equally like the facts are standing behind the color: Exploitation, corruption, massacre, beauty, power, pride. Wessmann paints these facts as well and keeps them hidden as in a steelbox, because real painting cannot replace critical thinking, but can bring it to itself.

Michael Hübl, 2003