Volume VII – Veronika Hilger & Jana Baumann

You create intense pictorial compositions that are always marked by a certain ambivalence. Ambivalent in the sense of the ambiguity of the depictions. Do figuration and abstraction represent a contradiction for you in your painting?

I wouldn’t call it a contradiction, but rather something else – something all its own. It probably only works in this special way in painting. I think that’s actually the beauty of it – that, in this field, you can link seemingly contradictory things very well.

You work with forms that, in their combination, always open up associations with concrete scenes and narratives within the picture. How would you describe your motifs? What exactly are your themes?

Roughly speaking, there are two different groups of forms, which are mostly located on a kind of stage, often defined by a landscape setting. One is a group of forms that is very strongly associative: That is to say, that can remind us of many things, of physicalities, of vegetal or manufactured things, of all that surrounds us. In the painting, this group is treated in such a way that – if the associations are too clear, a reduction is once again undertaken in order to maintain the greatest possible openness.

The second group consists of forms that evoke very specific associations: Hand, foot, flower, stone, or vessel, where one is thus given clear guidance, but is ultimately only led to a superordinate field, which then refers to certain genres of painting itself.

You just mentioned it yourself: There is always an extremely tense relationship between bodies and things, between the organic and the inorganic. In your painting style, these terms and classifications become blurred. It is also an ambiguity that I often find reminiscent of dream-like states. My question is therefore: Where do your pictorial compositions and themes actually come from? In your more than a decade-long preoccupation with painting, you have often spoken of classical genres as starting points that inspire – but, at the same time, need to be critically questioned. Could you perhaps be a little more specific?

The most important source for my paintings is my preoccupation with painting itself. In addition, there is everything that one was and is directly confronted with. Equally, what one encounters in other cultural creations: what one reads, what music one listens to, or what films one watches. All of this flows in rather unconsciously and not by directly translating individual narratives, themes, or motifs. This also happens in the sense of moods or certain combinations where different worlds meet.

You constantly use traditional genres in painting and bring these together in one and the same picture. In addition, you link the subjects in an unusual way with themes of diverse origin, which you have just spoken about. In this context, you also recently mentioned your studies of ethnology before you turned to art. But to get back to where we were: You almost superimpose genres within one picture – do you want to make them collapse in their conventional sense?

I rather try to get them to open up a dialogue with each other – that is to say, to create a certain balance so that they enter into a kind of interaction. For me, this is less destructive; but it is true that the conflation of genres or categories then also breaks them down at the same time, or at least calls them into question.

I became interested in landscapes very early on and, for many years, it became a primary concern for me. It was above all painting, but also the study of European ethnology, that offered fields in which there were interesting overlaps, such as ethnobotany or garden architecture. Here, an attitude of mind, the relationship of humans to nature, notions of transcendence, or even a different agenda always become apparent. The English Garden, for example, is very closely linked to painting, insofar as it is conceived as a picture that you can walk into.

I was also interested in psychological aspects: how human perception works, or how realities are constructed.

It’s interesting how you transfer traditional genres into a painterly dialogue. In a way, you acquire a new language of contemporary relevance. You question the history of painting and create something of your own with it. For example, you’ve been dealing with certain themes for a long time now, whether it is landscape painting or still life. How did you move through the history of painting to arrive at your artistic approach?

What fascinates me about drawing on a longer history or on the history of painting in my work is that I can combine forms of expression that cover a large period of time. For example, a rectangular, colored area in a painting that stands for a landscape situation. This solution was found well over a thousand years ago to convey landscape. Of course, it’s not so radical that it immediately jumps out at you. But I like how points in time collide here and how elements or solutions from different epochs are combined. But again, not in the sense of collapsing, but rather of interlocking, which then lifts painting into a timeless state.

So in your work, a relevance is also given by reflecting on the history of the medium and reinventing it at the same time?

Yes, I think you could say that, in that things from another time are now reappearing.

Assuming that I would now work retrograde and perhaps update old models by copying them – in our initial situation, this would be read quite differently and could also be examined differently with regard to relevance. That’s the minimum requirement. But it only becomes really interesting when other references are added. A field of associations can be opened up that we can resonate with. This connection between landscape and still life clearly shows that a kind of living environment is being depicted here that has been artificially modified and arranged by human hands. In our time, this is read differently than it was forty or fifty years ago.

How did you come into contact with these genres? How did your involvement with landscape painting or still life develop?

As I said, I was initially particularly interested in the subject of the landscape. I then actually started to paint outdoors and tried out a lot of things that are possible when translating real or depicted landscapes into pictures: painting from photos, copying pictures, painting with the help of a beamer or digitally constructed collages. I initially used this as a field of experimentation to find solutions; and, at the same time, I started to look at a lot of things that already existed in the history of painting. The subject of the landscape offered a very good opportunity to get to grips with painting.

Especially in the beginning, I probably also had the basic need to find a motif with which painting could take place. I wanted to consciously limit my possibilities so as not to lose myself in too many options. This subject thus offered itself as a productive field to find new potentials of painterly expression.

As I progressed, I discovered more and more formal and thematic similarities between landscape and still life. A painted landscape already has a lot in common with nature morte. The dominance of a horizontal reference plane is also similar in both. I was increasingly preoccupied with how people are always indirectly present in both genres: in a cultural landscape or in a selection of things considered worth painting. From here, it was only a short step to include the interior and echoes of the portrait.

How would you describe the structure of your work? Do you divide it into groups of works or themes? Could you give us some insight here?

My work tends to be quite homogeneous. There are themes that come up time and again, as well as a certain recurring aesthetic – amorphous forms, for example, or these stage-like arrangements. There are various cornerstones that were there early on and are still there today.

And beyond that, there are specific themes, such as the nocturnal image.This was a sub-genre that used to require a great deal of inventive talent in painting. I found the numerous solutions for it exciting – as well as the contents associated with the nocturnal image. I wanted to reflect on both from a contemporary perspective.

You can also recognise that, over time, other subjects were added, whereby something indifferent or abstract increasingly revealed itself. An allusion to interiors then became more intense, or the human being appeared more frequently by means of formal references to the portrait. This was not the case for a very long time. I somehow didn’t want it before, to avoid an exaggerated narrative or the individual.

So, all in all, there are no sharply defined groups of works, but rather a homogeneous field where things accumulate and at the same time open up in different directions.

One senses in your paintings, as well as in the sculptures, that you are strongly attracted to illusionism. This stylistic device has a long tradition – and, at the same time, you radically distance yourself from it in many painterly gestures, don’t you?

Yes, that’s what we discussed at the beginning in connection with ambivalence. I’m fascinated by this possibility that a brushstroke in connection with an illusionistic mode of representation can acquire something material. It thus presents itself as though it were a thing.

Forms of expression that emerge from the pure process of painting experience a translation into something representational again through illusionistic interventions. And suddenly, a form that emerged from the flip of a wrist, from an intuitive search for form or a quick movement, can thereby gain a sense of solidity and a convincing presence and be there in a fixed way.

In the context of your ambivalent relationship to illusionism, which we discussed, a surreal component always seems to resonate in your works. How important for you is the unconscious, the psyche within the picture?

That’s very important to me. But less in a psychoanalytical sense. I see it more as a suggestive field to which I myself can connect when working – but also the viewers, and through which a psycho-emotional space can be opened up. In this way, a strong relationship to the image is going to be established.

You keep the viewer constantly in motion in the perception of your pictorial compositions. Your pictures are based on a dynamic that brings about constant change when one contemplates them, whether in the representation or in its interpretation. Have you taken this into account, and what role do you want to put the viewers in?

In a certain sense, it’s already part of the calculation. I myself try to practise always understanding the painting from different viewing situations. Not only by walking around and looking at it from different points of view; for me, it’s important to constantly question the painting: What effect does it have? Why does it have that effect? How else could it be seen? Why are certain things in the foreground, and why does it suddenly seem threatening? Where do emotional qualities play a role? I’m thinking quite a bit about all this. Of course, I would like the viewers to feel the same way. The problem is that there is also a certain time requirement involved, because not everything can happen at the same time. The reading of pictures doesn’t take place all at one time, and it takes a while to perceive a variation. In the best case, you have time to look again and again in different moods and from different perspectives.

Sometimes, it can also happen quite spontaneously, in passing, that you suddenly discover something different, something new. That’s a quality that I appreciate very much.

A great power in your works emanates from the conflation of opposites, of the static and the animated, of humans and objects, of life and death. What questions do you want to address with this philosophical ambiguity?

We just mentioned that there are these temporal components. That is to say, that solutions from different epochs coalesce with each other. But time can also be read in purely formal terms by merging slow and fast painting processes. This reveals a certain time span between the individual phases, because it wouldn’t work technically otherwise. By means of painting, a certain relationship to time can be formulated, where the past is present in the now.

There are, as you say, many of these dialectical forms of expression: The liquid becomes solid again. The moment that was there briefly is frozen and thus somehow transformed into something supratemporal. The organic is confronted with the artificial.

In general, the organic is something that you can easily dock onto as a human, and that creates a kind of identification potential. For example, there could be a form that is reminiscent of a body, and I can immediately identify with it and am then, so to speak, entangled in this world. And the question promptly arises: How do I relate to what is there? How do I relate to any other form that is not organic, that perhaps has nothing human about it – or to one that definitely has something human about it? And then you have, for example, interpersonal themes that you can immerse yourself in, or you construct parables for your relationship to the world.

Or the whole thing is embedded in a strange atmosphere, in a strange mood that cannot be described with words, but which can be sensed in a subtle way and leads into a realm of the unthinkable.

Can you tell us a bit more about the organisation of spaces in your paintings?

I looked at how spaces have been constructed through the centuries. I often translated this classical construction in landscape painting, consisting of background, middle ground, foreground, without it referring to the pure organisation of the landscape. For example, when the middle ground is replaced by an abstract element, this leads to breaks.

And then there are simple procedures that are also used in non-objective painting and can evoke similar feelings of spatiality, a world or a pictorial world. An undefined space can thus be read as space. Partial overlaps, for example, achieve such an effect. There are fantastic possibilities, and often these are only tiny interventions. In addition, observations that I have collected while moving in the landscape itself help; for example, when you approach a hilltop and don’t know what lies behind it. Concealment always creates expectation. I also want to bring this tension into the picture.

Does it make a difference to you whether you work in painting or sculpture?

Yes, that makes a big difference – but there are also very many parallels. Everything that concerns the pictorial space falls away in ceramics, of course. But in terms of generating a certain form that has, for example, anthropomorphic tendencies or something object-specific, there can be essential similarities.

The ceramics are created on the basis of a repertoire of forms that I have developed in my painting. It is, however, never the case that individual elements from my paintings serve as a direct model for a ceramic.

The viscosity of oil paint has a certain similarity with clay. I can build something up, and I can take something away again. This translates very well in analogy in both media. The question of materiality and surface is, in a certain way, comparable: Both media offer options to use gloss, roughness, or mattness in a special way. In terms of craftsmanship, there are, in turn, extreme differences: Painting and ceramics have different boundaries and inherent laws that strongly influence design and form-finding.

Do you play form and color off against each other?

Yes and no. There are efforts towards harmony – the idea of certain dosages of the two, between which a balance is found. But there are also these surrealistic or at least irritating moments where a form evokes certain associations, which are then deliberately broken by a strange color.

In this respect, one could indeed speak of a playing off; in the sense of an irritation of the known. One is led along a certain path of association by means of the form but is disappointed again by the color and consequently kept in a state of indecision in which the motif cannot be deciphered or cannot be deciphered unambiguously.

Does color also have an emotional quality for you? Do you also understand your painting as an emotional space?

Yes, by all means – color definitely has an emotional quality. This applies to individual color tones, but certainly also to certain color constellations.

One aspect of the subject of the landscape that fascinated me from the very beginning was the fact that an emotional space can be opened up so wonderfully here. The history of painting impressively demonstrates how highly manipulative such processes can be.

Anything that evokes darkness and is then contrasted with something bright immediately creates small feelings of sublimity – even without a narrative. A contrast always has something dramatic about it and increases emotional involvement.

Several times in our conversation, you subtly hinted at political qualities in your painting. What’s political about your painting?

Political is, perhaps, the resonating question: How do humans relate to the world? Or: How do the individual parts relate to each other? How equal are the individual elements in relation to each other? Is anything allowed to be worth more than the other?