von Hoetmar

KUNSTHALLE DRESDEN

2000 - 12 - 09

Dr. des. Margit im Schlaa

“Painting of the Fourth Dimension”

During the process of my involvement with Norbert von Hoetmar’s art, I recalled a quotation by the French artist Paul Cézanne, who emphasized a distinctive mark of modernism:  “You must hurry if you still want to see something.  Everything is vanishing.”  Cézanne alludes to the drastic effects of the technical innovations of modernism and their effects on sensual perception. In a manner similar to Baudelaire, he lamented that the increasing acceleration of urban life had resulted in profound disturbance of contemplation and healthy distraction. This perceptional phenomenon of modernism and post-modernism – termed “the aesthetics of vanishing” by the French media theorist Paul Virilio – has been reversed in von Hoetmar’s art. By integrating electric light, an essential element of modern technology, into his painting in interplay with natural daylight, von Hoetmar gradually and continually renders visible his ever-new and fantastic dynamic pictures. Von Hoetmar thus dispels the misgivings of modern artists that technical elements could disturb perception and jeopardize the very survival of painting.  A process of constantly changing lighting conditions reveals different creative layers in his paintings, re-establishing unhurriedness instead of haste.

Von Hoetmar’s nude drawings increasingly play a key role in his remarkable definition of painting.  He followed this approach as an autonomous effort until 1996, one which he resumed recently and has called a “disciplinary action.”  This approach has served a dual effort:  to enrich his work and to employ nude studies as patterns for his light paintings.  The interaction of these genres is enhanced by their similarity of production.  Von Hoetmar employs what he calls “the guided opportunity” each time he prepares his canvas.  This technique results from the necessity of painting without being able to make subsequent changes in his work.  However, there is a significant difference: the integration of the fourth dimension of time, on which the unique character of these light-settings is based.  Only the passing of time contributes to the continuous changes being realised in the paintings.  The element of time renders them vivid and embeds them in a never-ending cycle of energy.  By allowing diminishing and increasing light to roam over his pictures, von Hoetmar creates a fiction of day and night. 

To shorten the natural 24-hour cycle, he uses beamers to imitate daylight; the tubes, invisibly fixed behind the transparent canvas, are permanently switched on.  Both floodlit and otherwise illuminated, the paintings reveal their underlying structure and develop a fascinating play of shape and colour.  An abstract silvery surface with a delicately-built grid structure during the daylight will give the impression that solid ice is thawing.  The deeper layers of the multi-coated acrylic resin colours become visible with increasing darkness and disclose fabulous new shapes that contrast with the monochromatic surface in a marvellous, brilliant, beaming luminosity.  Playful handling of the combined concept of abstraction and figurative art merges apparently incompatible pictorial representation with a dynamic process.  The result distinguishes von Hoetmar’s “Paintings of the Fourth Dimension” from artists who opt in favour of either abstract or figurative composition.  Visitors to von Hoetmar’s exhibitions are confronted with continuous transformation between the absence and richness of colour:  a process which serves as a metaphor of birth and death, of growth and decay, as they are commonly associated with darkness and light. This exciting experience of permanent change could well serve as a collective experience that can be gained here just as readily as at the opposite end of the earth.