Carl Aigner

A THIRST FOR COLOUR
Remarks on the Works of Elke Doppler-Wagner

“Colour has possessed me:
I am a painter”
Paul Klee

Perhaps in considering the artistic work of Elke Doppler-Wagner, we should remind ourselves that humankind has been endowed not only with the capacity to speak but also with the ability to create images, that human nature gives us the power not only to imagine things but also to make concrete representations of our imaginings. Such creations are a fundamental part of our existence: I create, therefore I am.

This applies in many respects to the works of Elke Doppler-Wagner; not only because she has created them with great passion and devotion, but also because creative artistry is a form of communication that is possible only through the power of art. Every artist develops her or his own work within the framework of certain contexts of art history, whether by negating them or by continuing, further developing, and transforming them. In her art Doppler-Wagner makes reference to her experience with Expressionist and non-representational painting and the movements that followed. It is a well-known fact that Expressionism made an important contribution to the development of abstract art. In a manner quite different from Impressionism, in which the external world, the scientific investigation of the nature of light and colour and how our sense of vision functions provided an important foundation for the understanding of art, Expressionist art focuses on the question of our internal perception and state of mind, which fundamentally determines our awareness of the world. In doing so, it frees our understanding of colour from its naturalistic, realistic and, in part, symbolic contexts and gives it an autonomous (abstract) status by freeing it from the representational, thus creating a link between the internal, emotional, spiritual and psychological sphere and the external, representational world. These complex artistic processes and changes, which must be seen as closely linked to the enormous transformation of European society at the beginning of the last century, still provide important moments of reflection today, although they are, of course, part of another contemporary context. (In passing, we should also remember the insights of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, which were of Copernican dimensions at the time.)

With regard to colour, abstraction, composition – in short: the artistic self-conception of Doppler-Wagner and her painting – the discoveries of Expressionist and abstract art provide the formative parameters. Nevertheless her paintings (acrylic, mixed technique with filler, plaster and sand as the predominant materials applied to canvas with a brush, spatula or sponge) are not Expressionist but rather expressive. The object is to create a personal reality, using colour as a material in order to express an inner mood and atmosphere in an autonomous world of images. Only to a limited extent is reference made to concrete elements, as may be seen in some of her titles, such as Volcano, Soul Landscape and Summer Meadow. Layers of thick, opaque colour are applied, partially covered, partially removed, so that areas of various colours in varied and imaginative depths appear, with openings that seem to lead into the interior of the canvas, creating an extremely sensuous and tactile plasticity. The landscapes thus created have a dynamism resulting from the varied use of colour; they convey a concept that literary scholars since the time of James Joyce have called “inner monologue”. The colour concept of the artist’s painting is at the same time her narrative expression, which ranges from the monochrome to the spatial, just as colours are at the same time both the form and content of her painting. It can be said that colour is the elixir of these paintings, which on the one hand are created in a highly spontaneous and intuitive manner but at the same time imply a variety of conceptual factors. But it is also the “royal road” to the artist’s internal being, her inner state of mind, her manner of communicating the content of the invisible world.

In this context, the painted picture can be understood as a kind of membrane, where the external and internal world and reality meet, touch and repeatedly wed, with this membrane moving from the internal to the external in the expressiveness of the colours. Thus we catch sight of part of the experience, discovery, feeling and knowledge of her personality. That is because pictures enable us to do something that can be experienced in no other way: to view the internal world of another person through her or his eyes! In this respect, even though we are constantly being flooded with images, these artistic pictures enable us to find a pathway to ourselves and to the world, and this is another concept that is explicitly communicated in Elke Doppler-Wagner’s artistic works. In this respect we must agree with the Austrian writer Peter Handke, who once said that pictures are the greatest treasures of humankind…

[English translation by John Winbigler]