Moments of Landscape
"Stop reading- look! Stop looking - go!", such is Celan's appeal in the "Narrow Guidance".
The subject that is guided narrowly by the poet according to a musical principle is the language, which is gradually being reduced in the course of his poem.
In artist Clara Rimann's pictures, a growing tendency towards a poetic abstraction can be detected as well.
On printed sheets of paper, strong, sweeping brushstrokes create compositions resembling calligraphic characters.
Instead of merely imitating nature, Clara Rimann constructs a kind of linguistic body.
She says: "I am someone who draws."
For setting signs contains a more direct translation than the painting process.
According to Clara Rimann, her aim is to see something and to write on paper at the same time.
And yet she can't relate to an uncontrolled All-Over.
Whether in her series "Gestern ist Heute" ("Yesterday is Today") or in her cycle of paintings "Omphalos", which are being shown in Athens, she always creates an energetic interrelation with the paper.
She does not wish to cover the historical prints and engravings, nor to cross them out.
The artist rather accentuates, extends certain lines and directs the observer's eyes away from the object towards the essential structure.
By means of only a few contrasting lines, she is able to create dynamics, to relocate the original main focus of the picture.
The artist describes her work as an emancipatory act, into which she playfully introduces her own structure.
Graphic signs weaving back and forth on the printed paper create a link between past and present during the painting process.
Clara Rimann combines different elements to form a unit, similar to a collage.
And her works are both: Self-referring pictures and carefully produced signs.
Her series of pictures titled "Mon petit ruisseau sauvage", created in 2001, is characterized by rhythm, motion and the interrelation of light and dark colour contrasts.
Here, everything seems to flow: small blue and grey dots crossed by black bars cover the sheet of paper like dynamic vectors.
In this work, the tight knot of interlaced lines has been loosened - the actual painted background shimmers through from under an openly designed structure.
A completely harmonic balance between line, shape, colour and a higher degree of reduction characterizes Clara Rimann's new small cycle of acrylics on tissue paper.
The once dominating black has turned into an almost transparent grey, covered by fine diagonal lines in shades of bright yellow and orange.
Here, Paul Celan's "Narrow Guidance" springs to mind again: for just like the poet, the artist guides her painting elements to an absolute reduction.
What she bans on paper by means of three colours, are mere remnants - landscape moments whose fragile beauty still has the power to easily kindle our imagination.
Hortense Pisano