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von Hoetmar


RÖMERVILLA GRENZACH
 
 


 

 

Light arouses pictures to life

Paintings and light installations in Roman ruins

(BADISCHE ZEITUNG, 1999-october-20, KULTUR)

Grenzach - Wyhlen

Light off; canvas on:  a spectacular, visual aha experience awaits visitors to the exhibition by the Berlin artist Norbert von Hoetmar at a Roman country house in Grenzach, Germany.  Von Hoetmar has installed 17 canvas paintings, each six feet high, among the old Roman walls – and has brought colour and shape to life by the use of fluorescent tubes.  The otherwise static, inert paintings appear abstract during the day.  With von Hoetmar’s sophisticated light dramaturgy at twilight, however, they become dynamic, protean heliochromes with marvellous, brilliant beaming luminosity.

The Berlin artist calls his artistic development “Painting of the Fourth Dimension”.  It indeed has the power to amaze even those who think they have seen everything.  In the dimmed Roman country house, filled with the sound of mystic, spheric music, Norbert von Hoetmar switches on the beamers and the tubes behind the transparent canvases. During the daylight, the canvas surfaces are abstract white surfaces with a delicately built grid structures.  The light setting, however, renders them into fabulous new shapes.  Both floodlit and otherwise illuminated, these paintings disclose their underlying structure and develop a fascinating play of shape and colour:  as though rigid ice were thawing.  With his light modulation, Norbert von Hoetmar adopts a kind of “magic event” for his art stage, which results in an exciting installation of light, art, sound, space and time.  This result indeed surpasses the conventional dimensions of painting.  With diminishing and increasing light roaming over the pictures, he creates a fiction of day and night.  Von Hoetmar’s “Painting of the Fourth Dimension” is based on an exceptional technique that employs several coats of acrylic resin colours.  The deeper layers – and consequently the representational motifs – can be recognized only when illuminated by the fluorescent tubes, fixed behind the canvas and invisible to the viewer.  What appears to the visitors as if by magic is combined with an enormous expenditure of conceptual and technical energy. Von Hoetmar’s basic idea is to lend his art a larger dimension.  Exceeding mere space, he bestows his paintings with motion and depth and intends them to address the phenomena of light and time.  Basically static images are thereby subjected to a process of continuous change:  they become truly vivid.  In addition, von Hoetmar’s work presents a tantalizing play with disguisement:  the viewer cannot easily or readily perceive what is veiled under the surface.

To most fully enjoy the total splendid effect of von Hoetmar’s paintings it is advisable to visit his exhibitions toward evening.

Roswitha Frey

 

Translation: David Bean

 

  

 


 
 

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von Hoetmar, Berlin, Germany