Artist: Oliver Nutz
Oliver Nutz’s paintings give the impression of being radically reduced and often reveal very little—at times almost nothing at all. But to only speak here of emptiness or absence, or to simply describe the two-dimensional and colorful pictorial displays in terms of monochrome painting, would be to miss the point. Encountered instead is a concept of painting that understands absence as essential to the act of seeing. The ability to look past what one sees, in this case reduction and abstraction, may be part of the act of perceiving, but from the viewpoint of reception aesthetics, a pictorial way of seeing is based in essence on how the imagination adds to what one sees as well as on what is appresent. This is because seeing not only reproduces the world but actively creates it—in the sense of an organizing principle of perceptual revelation, an inherently generative act. Here, it is therefore less about the semantics of emptiness than it is about the ontological nature of those absences, empty surfaces, and volumes. For Nutz, seeing is oriented not towards an exclusive viewpoint or a specific perceptual impact but towards the essence of things and phenomena. What is ostensibly missing, vague, and indeterminate does not produce semantic meaning, but rather opens up a field of polysemy, ambiguity, and evocation, but also one of anticipation, expectation, and the protention of future, potential perceptual impressions. Perception here proves to be inherently liminal, a threshold and transitional occurrence; it is not oriented toward the fixed, the entity-like, but rather on what is essentially mutable, processual, in the act of becoming.
Nutz’s painting evolves in the tension between composition and erasure, between mark-making and omission, but also between what has been created and what it has become or evolved into. His paintings have been constructed from the ground up yet they still appear autonomous, as if they emerged out of themselves more so than having been made. Will, intention, marks, and gestures are often reduced to a minimum. The artist seeks to allow the painting, in the present moment, with all its conditions and influences, to produce its own aesthetic effect. All components, such as paint, canvas, and stretcher frames, are always themselves, nothing more. The artist works without mimetic or simulative elements, without deception. The paintings are thus highly abstract and autonomous and are essentially self-referential. And yet in LIMINAL, all of the paintings, presented in portrait-format, function, when viewed from a distance and alongside one another, in the manner of door-like forms that open up an exit, a passage, a gateway. In their dual status, the images are simple, de facto objects, but they also oppose the empiricism and banality of reality.
Oliver Nutz creates paintings that, although essentially based on the language of materiality, facilitate a mode of seeing that transcends the object and thingness of painting when viewing them. The quasi fabric-like pictorial objects form interfaces between their actual, object-like presence and their transcendence, a penetration of and “translation” into ephemerality, atmospheric vagueness. His paintings prove to be a kind of pictorial ontological interface that not only allows an intertwining of two- and three-dimensionality, but ultimately raises questions about the existential status of the pictorial itself.
LIMINAL features paintings from the past ten years, presented in a manner that reveals the interconnections between individual series of works and creative phases. Works from 2013/14, characterized by central empty voids and accentuated edges, share space with large-format paintings created in the past four years, which are dedicated to space or the spatially evocative qualities of individual colors. Most of the paintings from 2013/14 feature black and white or gray tones, but the first small painting (40 x 30 cm) in the group of five is an exception to this. Its yellow edges not only bring out the object-like structure of the image ground as a flat cube, but the painting opens up a specific color space—from the edges toward the center, gently evoking the empty center of the canvas—that fluctuates between emptiness and the impression of color augmented by the imagination. In highlighting the frame, these paintings therefore alternate not only between object and image, surface and space. They also involve, on an abstract level, a shifting between seeing and knowing, visual (often indistinct) perception and geometrically “known” space. Unfolding between the edges—the display of color, the painterly marks, and the erasure of the empty center—is a display of pictorial space that is based on “almost nothing” and which, despite all its smoothness and simplicity, never comes to rest. The reciprocal tension between the pictorial agents, of what has been created versus what has been left untreated, produces an ontological conflict. Ostensible nothingness suddenly turns into fullness, which then also seemingly retreats again, thus inducing the inherent collapse of the pictorial display once more.
In these small paintings by Nutz, a coexistence or a kind of reciprocity exists between what is no longer visible and what is not yet perceptible. What is present or visible is juxtaposed with what is absent or subliminal, opening up a space for the implied, the supplementary, the protentional, the apperceived. Here we find a phenomenology of the vague, the delimited, the liminal, which regards indeterminacy not as a lack, but as a possibility, indeed as a space for negotiating painting. Transpiring within these forms of pictorial manifestation is a shift from non-being to a paradoxical form of perceptual being.
The various paintings in the group of five (actually three plus two) smaller paintings explore a variety of dynamics and aspects essential to the mutual intensification and “induction” between pigmented edges and empty centers. Maintained is a familial kinship, that is, of formal and pictorial structural similarities, which nevertheless evoke highly variegated pictorial-spatial-ephemeral spaces. Nutz creates a kind of experimental arrangement in and with each painting, employing a few, essential means that enable the elements to interact with one another in various ways in evoking pictorial space. He leaves the development of the painting to itself only in part. Although autopoetic aspects play a role—the undirected, random, aleatory—explicit aspects of decision-making, placement, and articulation are also nevertheless present. Even if subtle and modest in nature, recognizable here are distinct elements of authorship.
In the second painting of the group of five—with black pigmented edges—slight, index-like, more subtle markings are visible alongside the darkened edges of the painting on the otherwise untreated canvas. As was often the case in 2013/14, Nutz pressed the stretcher-bar edges of the painting from behind—i.e. with the painting surface face down—into pigment scattered on the floor, creating gentle transitions that move from the edge of the painting to the center. The transitions from color to non-color, however, are broken up by slight imperfections. The sense of atmosphere generated is interrupted by inverted inclusions, which appear as luminous spots within the chromatic progression. These slight disturbances inject a fragility or even instability into the coherence of the liminal pictorial phenomena, the spatiality of color, and its sfumato-like indistinctness, thus preventing a purely escapist mode of viewing. Nutz strives for a neither/nor, a state (of seeing) that precedes all forms of assessment, evaluation, or classification. It is precisely the open-endedness and state of flux that make these paintings so unique and subtly radical, as well as the challenge they pose to viewers given how introverted they appear at first glance.
Oliver Nutz’s paintings are developed within the dialectic of presence and absence, of offer and refusal, of objectness and its transcendence. Ambiguity here can be read as the appearance of the idea (Hegel), but also, in the supplementing, seeing into, and activation of viewing the works, as a focusing and emphasizing of subjectivity in line with the aesthetics of Romanticism. The emptiness, the ostensible void in the center, paves the way for an intuitive, probing, and discerning gaze. In this aesthetic of indeterminacy, what is perceived is revealed in a highly indirect manner, based on and in interaction with what is purportedly absent. In this ontology of indirectness, the non-being attains the status of a paradoxical being, of presence-absence.
While four of the five smaller paintings were created working from the outer edge to the center, either from in front, as in the third painting with the graphite-gray color gradation, or more directly, even clumsily, in the fourth painting by pressing it into black pigment on the floor, the fifth painting in the group reveals a different approach. Nutz simply presents the viewer with an inverted painting: a gray-painted canvas that he has stretched upside down, so that the gray percolating through the canvas becomes a latent, flat-gray, liminal display of color. Not only is the perceptual viewpoint shifted here, but one is virtually located behind and within the painting, sees through it, and any conventional viewer arrangement is relinquished.
The largest painting (140 x 110 cm) from this creative period of working, with the secondary title DARE (2013), reveals another subtle modification of the viewer’s perspective. In this case as well, Nutz sprinkles pigment on the floor and presses the edges of the painting into it, so that, given the size of the painting, one could certainly speak of a kind of blind, not simply inverse, technique. The concepts of subject and author are thus expanded in this case, but also fragmented. The painting—articulated here indexically, like an imprint or almost even a photogram—makes the distinctions between color, pigment, smudging, and imperfection seem irrelevant. As the support ground is laid down and pressed into the pigment, all the folds and edges of the canvas appear as subtle graphic formations. The surface is revealed not as a homogeneous, monochrome gradient that fades towards the center, but as a relief-like structure of light and dark, at times even landscape-like formations. Here, what is indistinct is juxtaposed with what is indexically precise, even objectively representational, making it impossible for the eye to simply lose itself in the sfumato of the gradations without being reminded of what evokes such a visual impression: the canvas and its indices.
Oliver Nutz’s paintings do not simply alternative between the representational and surface atmosphere. In his paintings from the last five years in particular, the focus is shifted toward pictorial and color space. The object-like nature of the support, the cubic geometry that he continues to address in the smaller paintings, gives way to a more inwardly oriented pictorial approach that is negotiated in two dimensions. Nutz shifts his attention toward individual colors and color spaces; elements of dissolution and transcendence of the pictorial object also occur here through painterly processes such as the subtle layering and the rhythmic application of paint. Also presented in LIMINAL are three large-format paintings, created in 2021 and 2023, in which paint in the form of pigment dust has been applied as usual by the artist, but which, in this case, has been sprinkled onto the front side of a support ground placed horizontally on the floor and consolidated with brushes into a compact, yet not entirely cohesive, opaque body of color. The painting Untitled (red) reveals a gentle clash between two pigments, where an interference develops between the blue underneath and the surface red, which gives only a monochrome and cohesive impression at first. Up close, the display of colors appears moving, dynamic, even vibrating and restless. The painting resembles a kind of membrane more than a given painterly entity. Precisely in its simplicity and with and because of its inherent concealments, the painting evolves to form a pictorial dispositif, an evoker of manifold, liminal pictorial phenomena.
The yellow painting Untitled (Y_23-3) also reveals itself to be, upon closer inspection, an unstable pictorial space, a dialogue between two yellow spatial layers. Here, Nutz creates a multiplicity of spatial layers that exhibit an atmospheric, almost monochrome quality, but which also appear unstable, dynamic, and mutable. What is perceived oscillates between various determinations that are seemingly vague and abstract in nature. Space in the sense of a definitive top/bottom and front/back is stripped of its coordinates and boundaries. Oliver Nutz negotiates spatial elements here in a decidedly non-perspectival manner. If one disregards the four edges of the painting, neither contours nor lines appear in this conception of space, everything occurs on and within the surface, color, gradient, and layering. The surface and intrinsic color values have the capacity to evoke spatial depth, which can, however, also soon lead to viewing things up close, even a sense of intimacy (when viewing the surface). What’s indistinct here thus both creates space and allows spatiality to merge into the two-dimensional, whereby this flatness also deflects the gaze in a certain way and reflects it back to the viewer. The viewer is tempted to engage with the emergence of the image, but is immediately returned to the immediacy of perception.
Oliver Nutz’s paintings oscillate between abstraction and concretion. His paintings are “figurations,” pictorial manifestations of the ephemeral. The actual “motif” is inherently unbounded and indeterminate. Revealed in the interplay, in the harmony between paintings, are liminal transitional areas and spaces that evolve among themselves, from one area of color to another. The invisible, the not-yet-or-no-longer-visible, is coupled here with a dimension of sensory enhancement and evocation, yet there is also a side to the paintings that is non-sensory, essentially abstract, even metaphysical, yet introverted. Even if they serve sensory enhancement, Oliver Nutz’s paintings also demand a kind of inner seeing. The gaze is also seemingly turned back on itself in a certain way, so that the viewer is made to consider their own ways of seeing. An initial, more-external mode of observation gives way to an inner, questioning gaze that oscillates between ontological intuition and relational self-orienting. In this sense, the viewer, who is at first lost in the act of viewing, arrives at a kind of reflexive contemplation that focuses on the essence and being of things, but also on viewing as an epistemological, aesthetic instrument that transcends what’s immediately visible, a seeing that leads from the world to the self as a manner of inquiry.
Text: David Komary
Translation: Erik Smith
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