Alexander Wolff / accro ache

Alexander
Wolff, coming from that productive, slightly Dadaistic Frankfurt scene, where
in the obvious absence of a city surrounding the Städelschule – at least this
is how it appears from the outside – everything seems to have been created by
the students themselves – clubs, exhibition spaces, yes, even cooks emerge from
there – opened a space immediately after moving to Vienna, began publishing a
magazine, founded a band, did everything, so to say, fervently and at once, so
that I was thoroughly astonished when he told me, one day as we coincidentally
found ourselves on the same plane (we had both moved to Berlin by this point),
that he had used the few hours delay of the plane to make a new painting. He
was, as I found out, working on a series of paintings on towels, whose
compositions were derived from the towels’ ornamental patterns. I was astonished
because his general productivity – I first met him, for example, as he was
vacuuming his exhibition space, which I had come to see – seemed to preclude that
particular, square-shaped, labor-bound activity of painting. I visited his
studio for the first time when he was preparing for the exhibition at Widauer
Gallery in Innsbruck – and between these encounters more than ten years had passed.
I arrived a half hour early, time he would otherwise have used to finish the
lower corner of the painting he was working on. So he packed everything
together, without impatience, (aired the room, cleaned his brushes, screwed the
lids onto the paint glasses, cast a last examining look at the lower corner)
and deferred completion to the following day. And I recalled a remark of one of
Manet’s contemporaries, who in his biography lamented the fate of late
nineteenth century painters, who ever only painted. Day in, day out, and when
they went on holiday, wherever they went, it was only to set up their easels
and seamlessly continue. For it is the field of the artisanal, painterly
production of pictures, not that of the sketchy drafting of an idea, that one enters
in this studio. This field comprises first of all, the general idea, the
reason, so to say, for beginning a series of paintings as an investigation, the
sketch, the setting up of the color palette, and the execution. Working in this
way, the paintings emerge as a series; they are the speech, the articulation,
each time taking on a new form through their application.  In the series for this particular exhibition
we are in the realm of signs, barely recognizable as such, which even for those
who can read Chinese characters – for Chinese characters are the basis of this
work – are not easy to decipher. From these emerges a world of various
geometric bodies, hollow forms and curvatures, whose connection to one another
is not sculptural in the sense of giving birth to a whole figure, but rather whose
individual constituent fields, composed in an optical sense, as schooled by
European Modernism, are assembled. The signs themselves must also first be
found. Therein lies a high discursive risk—each sign means something or could
mean something – Alexander Wolff can’t be completely sure – which is also part
of the fun. To paint, departing from the assumption that a “you,” a “now,”
“pizza” or “sex” is being transmitted. Conversely to this risk, there is a calm
security residing in this source material. For these are all characters that
have been formed over millennia of debate and negotiation regarding the
relationship between the line and the space within a square frame, in order to develop
a special harmony within it. To disturb this could be disrespectful, like a bad
joke about foreigners, were there not that incredible sense of being excluded from
something, of being, oneself, the foreigner, which struck him during his stay
in Taiwan, as he found himself thrown before these signs. These are all visual
barriers that present themselves within the sign to every illiterate person, a
barrier between a person and the world that can be circumvented with the YOU,
the NOW, with PIZZA or SEX, but which arise when you want to move on from
there, barriers before which you stand again and again the further you get. In
this fascination, these turn into another joke, this time not about, but rather
with the foreigner, for example when the clueless, non-turkish speaker attempts
to decline the word “lentil” (mercimek, thus merciyorum, merciyoruz, and so
on).

Subsequently
there are color spaces that form the transition from one painting to the next. There,
where there is painterly curiosity: if it works. One can find these color
spaces in others’ paintings and try them out, forming an idea, which can also
be found in some other sign out in the world. Alexander Wolff has also, at
times, painted large wall paintings only with colors derived from materials
from the surrounding environment, street dust, dirt, Berlin sand. And worked in
the color spaces of the Czech Constructivists. Night spaces of Asian cities
play their way in, again that peculiar marshy green, mostly transitioning into
white or black, which has to make sense for the particular painting. There it
meets the outside as an assertion.

The literary
historian and critic V.S. Pritchett urged the generation of English writers
(mostly men) after the Second World War, “to unself yourself,” to free
themselves from the introspective gaze, to take an interest in the stories of
the world and not see oneself as the emotional yardstick of the world. It seems
to me, that in the work of Alexander Wolff, this advice is put to work naturally.
Without wanting to go too much into the biographical, I see in many of my
friends who, like him, come from former East Germany, a curiosity about
everything that there is outside. It is a measureless, sometimes almost literal
curiosity, that always radiates a bit of joy about everything that one can see:
the colors, the cities, the languages, art, those things that others have come
up with in the past, all those thoughts and solutions and responses that
someone found, and all the questions.  

Ariane Müller