Perception games
The art of Brigitte Waldach is an intense road to different perceptions. She was born in Berlin where she studied art pedagogy and theory, and painting under Georg Baselitz at the Berlin’s Universtity of Arts. She’s been always focusing her creativity to the way we translate our perception of reality in order to create new images and spaces. Through the use of red colour in contrast with white or empty spaces, she puts our minds in a completely different environment so to experience her art is to open a door which once crossed will make us translate our own perceptions of life in a way we’ve never done before. Red colour as the pulse of life, as a symbol of passion but also aggression, has the main role in her works. That ambivalence gives her the perfect element for exploring a new way to translate the information we get from our senses in front the word as our main communication tool but never enough to express our imagination and our emotions.
With exhibitions from Buenos Aires to Seoul, Waldach has enjoyed recent solo shows at the Rogaland Museum of Fine Arts in Stavanger, Norway, the Kunsthalle Emden in Germany and the Kalmar Kunstmuseum in Sweden. As a consequence of the recognition of her talent, the Albertina in Vienna and the Berlinische Gallery in Berlin have included her works in their collections. Recently she has presented her latest project Logical landscapes at the Garden of Zodiac in Omaha, USA.
Which one is your personal landscape?
My personal landscapes are rather abstract, although naturally they revolve around a gravitational field of human emotion.
The title of the central image (Logical Landscape) seems like a contradiction. Is a logical landscape at all possible? Images arise with the help of thought, and a prerequisite of thought is language. In this exhibition, language—that is philosophy and literature—organizes the visual space.
In your case, art is a way to understand your current reality or to create new ones in contrast with the one you are living?
For me, art is the attempt to translate, or, in a way, edit, the flood of images that surrounds us into a different system of order. My starting point can be my own mental images or existing (media) images to which I give a form. But also in contrast, as a quote of the reality surrounding us.
In your works you play with different space dimensions. Which is the link between our perceived reality and the perspective?
My drawings are always a play with perception. Sometimes they are like a puzzle, in which perspectives along different visual levels seem to tilt. This can also happen physically in multi-part images, which create their own space, such as the corner diptychs.
The use of colour is reduced to a dominant white background and a minimalist presence of people always in red. Why do you represent our environment in a so pure white colour?
The white room, sparingly segmented, is like a blue box: a blank space in the scene that remains as a projection surface for the viewer. The less I specify, the more it could mean. I work with color codes: people are always dark red, while the various text sources are differentiated according to shade. Occasionally other colors are included, for example, blue for water, green for forest and graphite gray for architectural elements. The white color space is like a matrix of a newly created world whose creator is the viewer.
Where’s the red in human beings?
Red is their emotional center.
What’s a logical landscape?
Logical Landscapes is a composite title. On the one hand it refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s opus, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, which I excerpt and which appears here in its entirety. In addition, the work is not about specific landscapes or schematic, constructive mental maps, but rather sketches.
The word clouds are also an important symbol in your work. Where’s the point in which language becomes more a jail than a way of communication?
As suggested by the term, they are visible traces of an unlimited space, more of an outer phenomenon, expandable in all directions. I do not see language as a limited, closed system. For me, language functions without being assigned to specific figures. This is the opposite of the language-image principle used in comics. Here, instead of “speech bubbles,” they are “text clouds.” There is no clear-cut scheme of sender and receiver.
According to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus, the world is what happen and reality is what is possible. That gives us a concept of world and reality in which subjectivity is very important. How do you confront different subjectivities from your own perception?
I think that perception is an open principle, not only occurring in a limited field. This means that the limits of my perception allow the possibility of other subjective impressions. In this respect, confrontation is only possible when I abstract my perception and concentrate, like the snapshot of a moving picture.
Which is the place of dreams?
For me, the place of dreams is the place of fantasy, where we no longer need our linguistic thinking to prepare an image.BRIGITTE WALDACH | LOGICAL LANDSCAPES exhibition here
An interview by Juan Carlos Romero
Brigitte Waldach website www.waldach.com
Photo courtesy of Brigitte Waldach
All rights reserved