Dreams this Side of Real

Gottfried Salzmann’s pictures are an invitation to defy gravity, separating the viewer from normal feelings of space and time.  His landscapes pull the gaze of the spectator away from the earth, allowing it to glide over the surface offering glimpses of incalculable depths.  Salzmann has developed more and more into a soaring eagle, preferring to look at the world from on high, a modern Icarus floating above land and sea. 

Salzmann has a radical concept of the image which has given us his unique views of landscapes and cities, portrayals that are freed from the rules that typically govern such compositions. This concept is rooted in the physical nature of watercolor, a medium he has favored since the early days of his career.  He is drawn to its spontaneity and transparency, aspects in which it surpasses other mediums.  Salzmann’s flights are not those of an airborne flaneur exploring the infinite; uniquely, he understands how to temper an introspective descent into the self with an unerring analytical gaze. 

 

When he was young, Salzmann took up the avant-garde positions of the sixties, mainly from American abstract expressionism, optical art, and informal painting and adapted them for his somewhat different aims.  The aesthetic of the pure surface found its way into his watercolors. The radical way in which Salzmann directed the flow of color, the manner in which he applied it to the canvas without direction but employing structural elements owed something unquestionably to the principles of color-field painting. Salzmann reintroduced the landscape with a formless display of unlimited areas of color, as one might find in the large format works of Mark Rothko.  

He created a huge innovative boost for the genre of watercolor painting which had languished outside other significant developments in the world of art. All of these contemporary influences coincided with Salzmann’s “revelation” before the paintings of William Turner when he visited an exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London in the early sixties. 

Additionally, his approach to the treatment of the surface with regard to spatial construction lends the work a certain proximity to the landscape style of Gustav Klimt and the Secessionists, whose work Salzmann became familiar with during his studies in Vienna.  Simultaneously he makes use of the natural tendency of watercolours to spread, achieving a strong surface composition in which informal patterns are created by all kinds of spots, streaks, and drops.  His structures grow beyond the pure motif so that we have not just a concrete cityscape, but a fascinating landscape brimming over in all directions in a conglomerate of forms.  The abstract paint stroke and the function of representing an object merge, leaving no trace wherein one could perceive an act of subjective arbitrariness.  Salzmann works with strong opposites, which often cancel each other out somewhere in the picture: blurring and precision, amorphous dissolves and rigid structures, absolute two-dimensionality and the modulating effects of depth.  Seemingly irreconcilable positions of abstract and figurative imagery become an excuse for unusual combinations.  Salzmann enjoys making use of such deceptive transitions and one could even accuse him of conscious provocation in his use of playful ambiguity. 

What Salzmann avoids at any price is the expected line of sight.  He always occupies a position before or above the normal threshold of vision.  This unique viewpoint can elevate a scene from the banal and superficial to something with much more significance.

More than anything else, his pictures are homage to the sense of sight.  He shows us the trusted and familiar as if they were the fruit of the freest imagination.  Salzmann prefers to look at the world from above and from this point of view the appearance of commonplace objects disintegrate and yield to a higher formal context. 

Salzmann has no patent recipe up his sleeve.  He develops his strategies intuitively by making a particular selection of motifs, extracting their essential forms and then amplifying them to the point where an altogether unexpected quality emerges.  At first glance, what may appear to be mere use of abstraction is actually rooted in nature.  Salzmann invokes meteorological phenomena such as fog, haze, twilight or mist along with swathes of smoke and industrial steam which create a filtered atmosphere whether applied in intense colors or muted hues.   Salzmann sought from early on to introduce atmospheric areas of haziness into the picture – as in the reflected images on calm water surfaces or the windows of buildings or cars.  This natural effect is a welcome excuse to render the accustomed landscape incorporeal, by softening hard contours in a tremolo of fluctuating runny colours.  The spectator continues to lose his orientation as the quiet ripple opens a new dimension of seeing.  Salzmann is a figurative painter who searches for abstract forms.  One often makes the contradictory discovery that his landscape forms are intrinsically somewhat less concrete than the human figure or objects of a still-life, that the architectural can easily be reduced to geometric forms; that the landscapes featuring nature call for an informal visual language, whereas cityscapes require a constructivist approach. 

Many of Salzmann’s recent pictures invite us on a night journey through the streets of Paris, New York and Tokyo and we experience another variety of form-dissolving movement that does not necessarily correspond to what we might imagine in a city teeming with life.  He subordinates the aggressive frenzy of neon signs and traffic lights to another, somnambulant tempo, in which they flow in fluctuating veils of color.  We dive into a reeling, illuminated unreality while remaining completely conscious of the real locations and their throng of inhabitants.  In his cityscapes, Salzmann shows himself to be exhilarated in the face of the architectural megalomania of modern metropolises; he even contributes to their expansion and vertical development. Striped and corrugated facades could, if lifted from the urban context, function just as well in a pure constructive design.  Salzmann achieves especially forceful effects with his paintings of urban canyons, whose sheerness he accentuates by the use of an extremely high point-of-view.  Permeability, barely feasible in oil painting, renders this swooping change between dimensions possible.

On closer inspection one can identify a metaphor of decay in almost all Salzmann’s work.  He was thus perfectly qualified to document the shocking scenery of  “Ground Zero” which could  hardly be absent from his inventory of New York imagery.  The encounter was an event that greatly changed Salzmann’s formal language; the propulsion from gentle pastoral climes into this daunting vertical urban wasteland was a radical departure for him, even though it comprised the general aspects of spatial distance he always pursued in his compositions.

With all these works, Salzmann demonstrates that the watercolor medium can be used not only to create diffusion, but can also be employed as a precision instrument par excellence to achieve sharp-edged structures and polished surfaces.  Salzmann has always pushed against the perception that watercolor is somehow “lesser than” other artistic mediums.  The enormous prestige society bestows on oil painting and the resulting market niche it enjoys gives the unprepossessing, more intimate art forms much less exposure.  Thus, few watercolorists have been counted amongst the artistic masters.  Salzmann has had the challenge of rescuing watercolor from its perceived niche of dilettantes and amateurs and, especially in his adopted country of France, he has become a pioneer seeking acceptance and full recognition for this under-valued medium. 

Salzmann dispenses with the idea that a watercolor must be created spontaneously and swiftly.  For him, painting a watercolor is usually a lengthy process in which everything has been precisely conceived beforehand and is subject to several changes.  This entails a combination of various dry and wet techniques.  The paper sheets are wetted and laid out to dry, then partially washed out or painted over.  If an image appears too solid it is briefly immersed in water, diffusing the surface to suit his eye.  With his analytical and structural approach Salzmann has raised the watercolor to a new level. 

One innovative technique Salzmann has adopted is  the use of unconventionally large formats.  To cope with this leap in dimensions he ultimately found a new medium --  painting over photographs.  The act of “painting over” created a hybrid belonging to that long-established trend whereby painters appropriate photography and vice versa.  The work shares many points of contact with contemporary image technologies and in some ways many of his watercolors seem more photographic than those that actually entail photographs.  What he sees in the photograph is a reflected reality that invites a special challenge for painting and it is this that inspires his penchant for creating constructive hybrids.

In these large format works where he has painted over photographs, the two layers remain quite distinct and do not interpenetrate.  Salzmann seems to insist on the fact that the colors of the grisaille painted on the surface of the black-and-white photographic prototype are an exterior plane.  Sometimes the brush follows the intentions of the photograph in an obvious manner and then again he might paint in whole areas or construct entirely new configurations.  Significantly, Salzmann uses photographs with easily destabilizes motifs which remain identifiable despite a considerable application of paint and there are instances in which he uses paint to extend the original boundaries of the photograph. Although Salzmann sometimes uses diluted acrylics in his large formats, he always feels and acts like a watercolorist.  This is also evident in his etchings.  Indeed such comparisons in the production process are found throughout his work in all mediums, all of which Salzmann has mastered with innate competence.  There is a mysterious affinity at work, whether in the treatment of highly sensitive surfaces with acid baths, or the printing of various plates on top of one another – they all acquire characteristics similar to the applied layers of watercolors.  Recently Salzmann combined photographs with etched plates producing yet another new hybrid with its own unique visual reality.

Salzmann plays the role of an unassuming provocateur who destabilizes our senses, transforming opposites into forces of attraction and ruptures into oscillating congruencies.  The watercolorist is called to implement powerful creative impulses with a careful hand; emphatic emotions and powerful gesticulation are means of expression that would normally be out of place.  One might think that this would make his position less powerful since today the general expectation is that artists who have something to say employ strong artillery to deliver spectacular messages.  However, it is clear that even though it is whispered, the message can still be loud and clear. 

--Excerpted with permission from the preface, "Dreams this Side of the Real," in Gottfried Salzmann by Nikolaus Schaffer. Published by Thalia editions, 2006.

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