CHARACTERISTICS AND PROPERTIES OF THE FORMULATION

During the restrictive Covid19 period I do not receive visitors in the painting place. Usually it happens actually every week; and I answer many questions that follow the initial impression.

It is astonishing to stand between these enveloping walls; and the visitors remain silent – until someone asks the question:

“Were several painters involved in decorating the walls?”

I smile and explain that it is not painting, but that they are traces of the brushstrokes that have been driven over the edge, and that they have been created over the course of the months on top of and next to each other. In the beginning they were smooth strips of wrapping paper. Their effect on the person standing inside the room is inevitable and contributes to the peculiarity of the painting site. So it is understandable that this untried atmosphere stimulates an untried experience “How many people are painting here?” someone asks and is amazed that there are so many of them in this room. That it is expanding in a certain way is not surprising, for its boundaries are more distant from each other than they seem in the colorful teeming; and each white leaf that is hung up is like a window that fills up with what is coming out of the person. Everything belonging to the place of painting is astonishing, untried, unexpected. There is something here that the person painting has not tested anywhere. And yet it is nothing foreign, nothing surprising. In order to get to the bottom of the event, I have to explain some unexpected things.

continue reading on Arno Stern‘s blog: https://arnostern.wordpress.com/2020/09/30/eigenart-und-eigenschaft-der-formulation/