Caught up in Things. Reflections on the Paintings of Dirk Salz
by Dr. Martin Hellmold
The painter ‘takes his body with him’, says Valery. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings.[1]
When one stands before the works of Dirk Salz, it becomes impossible to escape the encounter with one’s own act of seeing. To perceive the paintings of Dirk Salz is to move in front of them, searchingly and intuitively, at one’s own pace, with an open and engaged mind, attempting to form an idea of the peculiar balance between emptiness and fullness, between factual materiality and visual appearance, which confronts the viewer. The perception of these works is dependent on the space in which they are displayed, the height at which they are positioned and, above all, the light that fills the surrounding space. The lighting conditions have a decisive influence not only on the colour and luminosity emanating from the artworks – affecting the intensity and gradations of the monochrome forms emerging within the inner space of the images – but also on the reflections on their surfaces, with which we are confronted.
The artistic development of Dirk Salz led from his early beginnings, which were focused on figurative representation, diverse experiments and the exploration of technical skills, to a gradual narrowing of his means and forms, reaching a point of extreme reduction. From there, the artist broadened his questions and visual language through engagement with fundamental philosophical reflections, as he found them discussed by thinkers such as Kant, Schopenhauer and others, as well as through analysis of positions in recent art history. Particularly influential were the colour theory and practical studies of Josef Albers and, most notably, Concrete Art. The evolution of this movement since the 1970s, as seen in the work of Imi Knoebel, demonstrates a significant connection to Minimal Art, which also played an important role in shaping Dirk Salz’s approach. Crucial inspiration for Salz also came from his engagement with the ‘abstract sublime’ of American Modernism, especially the large-scale paintings – tending towards dualistic or monochrome colour choices – of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. Newman’s exploration of ‘[m]an’s natural desire in the arts to express his relation to the Absolute’,[2] which he pursued not only in his works but also in his writings, can likewise be understood as a reference point for Dirk Salz’s artistic interests.
Key practical steps in the refinement of Dirk Salz’s unique artistic language include the layered use of transparent resins in the painting process, the expansion of the canvas into object-like forms and the deliberate incorporation of reflection effects into the work’s form. In addition, there are subtle details that the viewer first perceives only intuitively, and then consciously upon closer inspection, such as the drip marks along the edges or the rounding of the corners. The works we see today are thus the results of a long and intense process, shaped not only by epistemological and aesthetic questions but also by the practical methods of painting and the continuous refinement of his means of expression.
Salz himself identifies his fascination with opposites as an important driving force that repeatedly influences his work. Key pairs of opposites relevant to understanding his art include rule and chance, plane and depth, matter and spirit (or: the real and the imaginary), lightness and heaviness, as well as brightness and darkness – the latter playing a central role in Salz’s pictorial conception. This is hardly surprising, since the great importance of light in his painting can best unfold through a clear light-dark contrast. In painting, this contrast almost always manifests as a dialogue between a non-colour (black, white, grey) and a colour, whose perceived monochrome nature, however, often appears subtly shaded due to its layered structure.
Just as the contrast between light and darkness holds a central place, Dirk Salz’s extraordinary use of reflections also draws attention to the act of seeing as a theme in his art. What do I see? How does seeing work? What are its prerequisites? How do changes in the conditions of my seeing alter what I see: for example, by shifting my perspective by moving sideways, approaching or moving away from the artwork? What is the relationship between the light-filled colour fields within the painting and the illuminated inner space of my consciousness, where I reflect on what I seen? When encountering this painting, one is quickly immersed in a study of one’s own visual perception. Not just of ‘pure seeing’, understood as a mere ‘operation of thought’ that would ‘set up before the mind a picture or a representation of the world’ (Merleau-Ponty) but of the entire complex process that cannot be fully grasped without involving the body.
In contrast to an intellectualised approach to viewing art, which is typically blind to the physical presence of the viewer and the questions arising from it, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty questioned the traditional division of the senses into five distinct perceptual areas, which positions ‘seeing’ in opposition to its object, ‘the seen’, as a distant entity. He noted that ‘vision is […] made in the middle of things’:[3]
My moving body counts in the visible world, participates in it; that is why I can direct my body in the visible. Moreover, it is also true that vision depends on movement. We see only what we gaze upon. What would vision be without any eye movement, and how would the movement of the eyes not blur things if movement were itself a reflex or blind, if it did not have its antennae, its clairvoyance, if vision were not prefigured in it?[4]
With the bodily component of seeing, which primarily consists of orienting oneself ‘in the visible’ – that is, through the movement of the perceiving body in front of the painting – a whole complexity of visual perception processes comes into play. This complexity aligns with a type of painting that has stepped out from the illusory space of the picture plane into the real surrounding space, where it encounters the bodies of both the painter and the viewers. Merleau-Ponty sees the key to understanding this complexity in the ‘enigma’ ‘that my body simultaneously sees and is seen’:
The one who gazes upon all things can also be gazed upon and can recognize, in what he sees then, the ‘other side’ of his seeing power. He sees himself seeing; he touches himself touching; he is visible and sensitive for himself. He is a self, not by transparency, like thought, which never thinks anything except by assimilating it, constituting it, transforming it into thought—but a self by confusion […] inherence of the one who sees in what he sees, of the one who touches in what he touches, […]—a self, therefore, that is caught up in things, having a front and a back, a past and a future.[5]
Merleau-Ponty explicitly emphasises the difference between seeing and thinking. The abstract process of thinking, which can be imagined as disembodied, is fundamentally different from seeing, which is bound both to the visible, external world – experienced physically as well as visually – and to the corporeity of the ‘self’ that sees. Seeing is indeed connected to thinking, as it wouldn’t be human vision if optical information weren’t passed on to the mind, but it is not conceivable as a purely disembodied process. Seeing always remains connected to the tactile world because, as Merleau-Ponty noted, ‘every vision takes place somewhere in the tactile space’.[6]
Viewing the works of Dirk Salz vividly illustrates this complexity of our perception, making our position ‘caught up in things’ tangible. While we try to deepen our understanding of the colour compositions before us – while our gaze penetrates the web of coloured light presented in Salz’s works, which he refers to as ‘colour transitions’ or ‘Fadings’ (see, for example, fig. X) – or as we concentrate on determining the proportional relationships of the layered forms in his ‘colour field paintings’ or ‘Deep Dives’ (see, for example, fig. Y), the reflections on the painting’s surface have already turned our own portrayal into a new object of our observation. Along with our shadowy reflection, which initially disturbs and confuses our perception of the painting, the space we physically occupy also comes into view through the light effects of these reflections. By emphasising the horizontal and vertical in his composition of colour fields, Salz not only echoes the fundamental shape of the rectangular painting but also designs the structure of the image with the anticipated reflections in mind – reflections that, in most cases, align with architectural standards like window frames or room edges. The pictorial space in front of us merges with the space behind us through the reflections on the surface. This way, in the act of observing the painting, we become unexpectedly aware of ourselves as those who have got ‘caught up in things’.
Merleau-Ponty formulated his analyses of the corporeal aspects of seeing in 1960, using as examples established modern masters such as Cézanne rather than contemporary artists, even though the importance of the connection between the artist’s body and their work – seen, for instance, in the ‘Nouveaux Réalistes’ in France or Jackson Pollock in New York – was exploding at that time. His historical orientation offers a clue to seeking the causes of the shift toward corporeity in art before 1900: in the media-historical upheaval brought about by the establishment of photography for traditional visual arts.
The profound impact of this epochal crisis in painting, alongside the loss of its role as a medium for representing reality – something that photography could achieve far more economically – appears to be the threat of losing the ‘aura’ of the original, which the ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, i.e. its mass photographic reproduction, experiences. In his eponymous essay from 1936, Walter Benjamin foresaw the consequences of omnipresent availability of images, a phenomenon we experience today in the digital age on a far greater scale than even he could have predicted. Despite this, artists have continually found new ways to make the physical encounter with their works a prerequisite for an authentic experience, thereby creating a new ‘auratic moment’. Dirk Salz is part of this tradition, with his conception of the image whose corporeity transforms viewing his works into a complex sensory experience.
Salz’s works are particularly ‘concrete’ in the sense that the immediate encounter with them cannot be replaced. Despite the skill with which he photographs them for catalogues and online presentations, their ‘holism’ resists technical reproduction. While this claim often appears as a mere cliché of art science, in the case of Dirk Salz it cannot be doubted, because the actual depth of his paintings and the reflective surfaces produce visual effects that can only be experienced through movement in front of the artwork or through changing light conditions. These perceptual phenomena require the presence of the artworks in three-dimensional space – or rather, in the four-dimensional space-time continuum.
Given that Dirk Salz has found such a vivid way to make space and time recognisable as conditions of our perception, it is not surprising that he identifies the philosophy of Immanuel Kant as one of his starting points. In contemplating Salz’s works, we can physically experience what Kant meant by ‘space and time as forms of pure intuition a priori’. At the same time, we are confronted with the limits of perception and knowledge – limitations that the Enlightenment philosopher sceptically formulated, and that are also a subject of Dirk Salz’s art:
Even if we could bring this intuition of ours to the highest degree of distinctness we would not thereby come any closer to the constitution of objects in themselves. For in any case we would still completely cognize only our own way of intuiting, i.e., our sensibility, and this always only under the conditions originally depending on the subject, space and time; what the objects may be in themselves would still never be known through the most enlightened cognition of their appearance, which is alone given to us.[7]
—————————————-
[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in: The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Ted Toadvine (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 351–78, here p. 353.
[2] Barnett Newman, ‘The Sublime Is Now’, in: Reading Abstract Expressionism, ed. Richard Pipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 137–39, here p. 137.
[3] Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, p. 354.
[4] Ibid., pp. 353f.
[5] Ibid., p. 354.
[6] Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 134.
[7] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 168.