Paintings

Aurelia Waßer’s most recent work confronts us with bewilderingly sublime landscapes. Her paintings have always had an affinity to surfaces resembling landscapes and their deeprunning currents, but never before had the artist so consistently made the landscape itself the subject of her art.

Now it shows: Her figures, familiar from her earlier works and that she has never fully unveiled, grow out of the most disparate panoramas: moonlike, volcanic, desert-like ones; out of fissures, crevices, rifts; silent expanses, firmaments, troubled fields. They have roots in the ground of landscapes, unfolding their peculiar presence and their subtle richness of relations which are waiting to be discovered in their vastness. Aurelia Waßer’s landscapes are thus a romantic setting in the truest sense of the word: They always represent an elemental ’inside’ or ‘beneath’. Her paintings are geographic forms of a complex inner life, of whose structures and preoccupations the artist sounds the depths as she paints. Mental landscapes develop in the process which, not least through the materials she works with, are close to the earth, dust-bound; raised out of sand, ash, and coal. They draw their vitality from the suspenseful opposition of bright spectrums of colours and burned, charred organic material, which, as we gaze upon them, seems to light up passionately one last time – again and again. Beyond these extremes, Aurelia Waßer’s expressive art is unattainable because we ourselves are unattainable beyond these extremes.

AUTHOR
– Stefan Jooß –

TRANSLATION
– Bronwen Saunders –