Gritli Faulhaber | Density and Decay

"Seek the extremes, that's where all the action is." This quote by the American painter, conceptual, and performance artist Lee Lozano appears on a painting by Gritli Faulhaber. Lozano, who turned away from the art world after a short but intense career, is considered an artist's artist—someone who wanted to know and thus inspires other artists.

Faulhaber's artistic work is rich in references to feminist art history. In her paintings, she unfolds a dense web of pictorial quotations, visual references, and allusions, weaving them into a conceptual hyperimage—a hybrid painterly montage of diverse pictorial fragments. No image stands alone; everything evokes associations, transcends itself, and demands more knowledge and experience. Her painting breaks with genre conventions and transcends contradictions. Media reflection and emancipation go hand in hand. Yet this demanding, curious art does not slip into a scholarly pose that exhausts itself in the didactic display of art historical knowledge.

Faulhaber's painting retains something provisional, sketchy, tentative, searching, and yet also unexcited. As if the canvases, with all their painted fragments and references, were direct extensions of the artist's sketchbooks and workbooks. Private finds, suggestions for further work. "Now I'm able to paint what you have processed photographing" – a quote from fellow artist Maximiliane Baumgartner – is written on another work, as if what is depicted were only a modest step towards clarifying what this painting is capable of. What emerges is not the gesture of consummate mastery, but a painting in the making, a learning process. "Which is why we now leave a large gap, which must suffice as an indication that this space is filled to the brim," it says in Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" (1928). A comparable generosity characterizes Faulhaber's sensitive handling of pictorial space.

Thus, the aforementioned quote from Lee Lozano appears in a different light. It's not the extremes of transgressive boundary-crossing, in excess, with all violence, that are sought; rather, it's about maximum openness, which finds its appeal and new sensations everywhere. Since the world is dominated by "strong men" in politics and business, this can hardly be overestimated. "Militant Joy," as Faulhaber calls one of her ongoing series. These extremely reduced, small-format works are created in recurring phases in which the artistic scope is extremely limited. The artist lives with ME/CFS, a severe neuroimmunological disease. The ability to paint in this way becomes a self-assertion against one's own body. As if it were a matter of defiantly saying: "Now I'm able to paint what you will never process photographing."

However, to explain these paintings solely in terms of the illness would be simplistic. They are far more than the documentation of diversionary tactics or coping strategies. They are that too, but not only that. Anyone who sees several paintings from the series side by side, as was possible until recently at the Neuer Essener Kunstverein, soon recognizes the subtle differences. Not everything functions the same. Not everywhere does the same tension emerge. Stains, dabs, dots, strokes, and all manner of traces give rise to a rich spectrum of rudimentary painterly gestures. Some things condense, others disintegrate. Here an order appears, there again not. "Yes, painting, the act of painting proceeds through chaos or catastrophe," as Gilles Deleuze noted in his lectures "On Painting" (1981), which were also published in German translation at the beginning of the year.

Deleuze also asked himself: "What happens when nothing comes of it, when the catastrophe spreads, when it all becomes a mess? In certain cases, doesn't one get the impression that, yes, the painting is failing? It happens again and again that painters fail, throw their paintings into the corner—the whole thing is most astonishing." For the philosopher, engaging with painting becomes a reflection on meaning and meaninglessness. The painter Maria Lassnig described it this way: "The formation of the picture is torn back and forth in unrest until it comes to rest at the mysterious 'point of certainty.'"

It's understandable that painters have a heightened interest in a "philosophy of painting," or at least in intensive reflection on their own practice in order to imbue it with meaning and significance. But what else can sympathetic newspaper readers draw from such considerations? Art history is full of scholarly interpretations that have settled into self-indulgent escapism. Convinced invocations of a politics of art are often not much more convincing. And the "militant joy" of "being able to do anything and being allowed to do anything," as advocates of rigorous artistic freedom demand, is also a symptom of a wounded liberalism. Why, then, devote even more intensively to art consulting? Perhaps, after all, in order not to go crazy in this crazy world.

Or even to practice hesitation: "to experience situations and circumstances that become symbolic because in them, the action itself and its relationship to the world have become problematic, at least for a moment," as Joseph Vogl writes. Perhaps it helps to further sensitize one's own perception and sensitivity in order to counter the post-factual cynicism all around us. Faulhaber's painting offers the possibility of escaping capitalist instrumental rationality, at least for a few moments. That can't be everything, but it's not nothing either.