Gaping holes. Strange, amorphous creatures flying across the canvas, pink vulvae, blackened mouths wide open, stones, marine fauna, starlike tank traps, Europa stars, stars in the sky, birds, sinking ships. Everything. And yet none of all this. A good way to approach the art of Wolfgang Walkensteiner is by means of association, or better still – to be in a state of bewilderment. For art goes beyond the boundaries of what can be explained, it is literally unexplainable and, as Artaud says about “all true language”, “incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.” (“Tout vrai langage est incompréhensible, comme la claque du claque-dents.”) Indeed, when one contemplates Walkensteiner’s imagery, Artaud inevitably keeps crossing one’s mind, this poet, philosopher, actor and director who shattered conventional theater to pieces and reassembled those pieces to create something new. The fact is, Walkensteiner too is constantly creating something new from what has been destroyed; he cuts forms and motifs out of painted canvases in order to adapt these memory fragments later to other paintings as inlaid work, thus creating, in a highly complex process, a new reality. Destruction and retrieval. Healing art with art – it takes a very close look to see the cicatrization that occurs at the place where past, present and future intersect, a place where a fissure literally opens up into the great void, that zone that has always had a great power of attraction for artists. “As a matter of principle, I avoid the rational,” says Walkensteiner, “but what I have in mind is not irrational, rather arational. As a rule, I begin with a vague idea, I give shape to it in a painting, I cut out parts of the motif and replace them with other elements – or I leave holes. I’m interested in creating a kind of event on canvas.” Light and Shadow The worktables are strewn with hundreds of cut out shapes collected over the years, and lying next to them, small, pale objects made of clay, and a few larger figures hanging from the ceiling. All of these constitute Wolfgang Walkensteiner’s universe of forms; they are autonomous works of art, and at the same time objects that provide him with inspiration. One could say that Walkensteiner paints from nature, except that he creates his world-view (Welt-Anschauung) material himself. This is true because, before he begins to paint – the canvas covered with a network of graphite lines so delicate that they seem to be wafted by the air, as well as turbulent snarls, intense, gyroscopic swirls, nervous brushstrokes or bold strokes in monochrome egg tempera –, he first kneads these little clay sculptures “in a kind of creator’s madness, like when God formed Adam out of clay.” On the basis of these three-dimensional “sketches”, he studies the relation of light and shadow, transfers it to the canvas from various perspectives, combines imagery, layering and interleaving different levels and shapes and colors, bits and pieces from the past, drawings and paintings, one on top of the other, one next to the other, and thus creates the illusion of an (unintelligible) narrative, the venturesome utopia of the endlessness of being – in space and time: “It’s all about space, the permeability of space; and wherever the space is too unambiguous, I infuse it with a different space. The objects have real form, but at the same time nothing to do with nature. I like this paradox, it’s my idea of artistic freedom.” Bodies without Organs Life, wrote Antonin Artaud, consists of burning up questions. Art even more so. More than by the great names in art history, such as Francisco de Goya, whose feel for atmosphere he admires, or Jan Vermeer and his subtle treatment of light and shadow, more than by Diego Velázquez, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso or Marcel Duchamp, Walkensteiner is inspired by poetry and philosophy: he names Georg Trakl and Friedrich Hölderlin, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Incidentally, in his book The Logic of Sense, Deleuze borrowed from Artaud the phrase “body without organs”, a notion that Artaud himself describes thus: “No mouth / No tongue / No teeth / No larynx / No oesophagus / No stomach / No belly / No anus / I will reconstruct the man that I am.” It is these bodies without organs that also inhabit Walkensteiner’s pictorial realm, all of them thrown into a great meandering river of time, signs and colors. “What interests me is the question concerning man in the broadest sense, the question of man’s purpose in the world,” says Walkensteiner. “A central question is that of death seen as the most important event in every life.” Consistently, then, he leads himself and the viewers to the abysses of human existence. Where do we come from? Where are we headed? And how do we create a path from here to there? It is all about life, and nothing less. It is about love, death, about the delusory certainty of the visual world and that unknown universe behind this world of ours that is supposedly so real, that unknown universe where understanding ends and art begins. Walkensteiner goes about this in a vocabulary of shapes and colors that is totally individual: night green, hyacinth and autumn yellow, berry red, vapor blue, cyan, magenta, pale pink – here and there as diaphanous as the gossamer-like colors of Georg Trakl, a poet whose verbal imagery Walkensteiner loves. Color alone is the place “where our brain and the universe meet,” said Paul Cézanne. Abysses Born in 1949 in Klagenfurt, Carinthia, Walkensteiner studied architecture at the Academy (today University) of Applied Arts in Vienna at first. However, he soon realized that in mathematics and subjects in construction technology he would never be able to keep up with his fellow students who had attended a polytechnic school – “I had no feel for proportional relations” – and he switched to the Academy of Fine Arts, where he attended the painting class of Max Weiler. Similarly to his meister, the young artist, who, at the age of 26 – along with Joseph Beuys – took part in the Venice Biennale, began by doing abstract painting of nature, later doing informalist painting, “But that was too vague and undefined for me.” Nevertheless, he continued to have interest in informalist drawing and flat, abstract painting – if only as far as the background and the undercoat were concerned. “I like this approach, which allows me to let myself run free in the background in an informalist way, virtually without a plan, even if I already have the basic composition in my head. I get completely into it, I want to know what I’m doing and to be in control of what I’m doing.” Brief pause. “I want to keep myself in the spirit, so every once in a while I also have to make it difficult for myself.” This searcher on a life’s journey has always remained an outsider with respect to the art market, a market conditioned to all that is loud, to self-marketing, to sensationalism, to smooth urbanity. And yet, “I believe in art! It’s alive! It’s not only a financial investment.” With this unshakable faith, Walkensteiner enters his atelier early every morning, mixes colors, models objects from clay, does cutting out and inlay work, researches, experiments, delves into his own world and, for mood, listens to the Rolling Stones – “always have, always will, without compromise”– but especially contemporary music, Alfred Schnittke, Krzysztof Penderecki, Hans Werner Henze, Friedrich Cerha, Bruno Strobl. “It took me some time to acquire an ear for it. Now this music leads me to the abysses that I’m searching for with my art.”