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The Longing for Illustration and Meditation

The Silhouette as an Empty Form

Gerbert Frodl

Director, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna

    Memory weighs too heavily on many artists. It sits like an appalling nightmare on the hand of a writer. In the case of an artist like the painter and graphic artist Robert Hammerstiel, who witnessed the atrocities of the Second World War in his early youth, and endured the miseries of the life of a refugee, bad memories have become the dominant theme in the story of the artist's life. They accompany and shape the message of his work.

    The medium of Hammerstiel's artistic statement is a language of images that recalls the symbolists and expressionists of the early twentieth century: take the paintings of Edvard Munch, for example, or the wood engravings of Emil Nolde. The paintings of the pre-1980 period in particular are marked by a formal language that draws on the vocabulary of symbolism. Predominantly naturalistic Interiors, inhabited largely by female figures shrouded in long garments, create a stage-like effect. The tenseness of the spatial representation, the often-oppressive perspective and the multitude of people in the picture are redolent of expressionism. These paintings are attempts to resurrect moments of memory, to immerse them in a world of shadow, thereby perpetuating the traumatizations of childhood within a schematic realism.

    Similarly muffled and schematic figures, usually depicted in relation to each other, appear in the wood engravings, a medium of which Hammerstiel is a master. The printing process of graphic art the shapes appear even more shadow-like, even more severely reduced to their outlines. The contrast between the dark area of the representation and the white field on which it-is represented engenders a suggestive dynamic of its own. Moreover, the artist likes to utilize the grain of the wood imprinted on the paper. The internal form of the work is thus the result of the printing method determined by the material. However, the artist consistently shapes this materiality to his purpose of portraying the network of relations in which these characters are held.

    The oil paintings that Hammerstiel has now been producing for over a decade form an extreme contrast to the largely black and white wood engravings of the same period, for they are the work of an incomparable colorist. Warm, monochrome oranges contrast with sparingly applied, yet powerful blues and violets. The bold colors smooth finish of these works position them close to contemporary North American painting in the Pop-art tradition, with its assimilation of the assertive graphic techniques of advertising. But Hammerstiel stays true to his own personal statement. For the subject of his communication is not the scenic potentials of color, but people: people in rooms, people in conversation, people in relation to each other. The confined and narrow spatial effects suggest a television studio; the artist's eye is an imaginary camera. Divested of all realistic detail, the figures appear if anything even more radically schematic. The colored silhouette becomes a kind of empty form that needs to be given content in the mind of the viewer. In this way, color and form acquire an autonomous suggestive power, creating a space of reflection and meditation.

    It is hardly coincidental that Hammerstiel's clientele includes religious institutions, which is something unusual for a contemporary artist. Hammerstiel's messages give pause; they achieve their effects by means of association. His images are also very suitable as accompaniments to written texts. This is an art that is poised between the autonomy of color and form on the one hand, and traditional representationalism on the other. It satisfies the viewer's yearning for illustrations that come close to reality, while remaining to further interpretation and meditation,