OPENING: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2015, 6-8pm

October 22, 2015 - January 30, 2016

It is with great pleasure that we announce our third solo exhibition with

Filib Schürmann (*1976) at Rotwand.

It is no surprise to know that Filib Schürmann is a great admirer of Samuel Beckett’s work and, he says, the writer is more of an inspiration than the great artists of the past. In fact, it seems that the essence of Beckett runs through the pulsating veins of Schürmann’s works, from his early intimate works on paper to his most recent larger abstracts, although they have also absorbed a rich mix of sources along the way, including art brut, Greek mythology, Russian literature, William Blake, Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Robert Walser and the mystical writings of Jakob Lorber. ‘My art has always been about existential questions,’ he says. ‘To search for meaning, for boundaries between reality and insanity.’

And Schürmann does this by starting from zero. He never plans his work but puts his pen on the paper and begins to draw. This process expands outwards in the way he marks the surfaces with determined lines – with swirls, swipes, blots, lines, brushes, scrapes – all executed in various ways from pen to brush to finger. It is an instinctive, unconscious process that involves the construction of many layers of imagery, the results of which are the elaborate and delicately balanced results, as seen in works such as for example the unnameable (2013). ‘The pens bring forward the unknown, the mysterious, the nameless,’ he says. ‘They breath life into the subconscious.’

Text has always been an integral part of Schürmann’s work. A keen writer who has written poetry for years, he regards these inclusions as integral to the works – and he considers the words to be as visual as the marks he makes. Are they an expressive language of the bodily gesture? Schürmann isn’t bothered whether people read the text or not. In that respect, the dynamism of his lines in both word and gesture blurs the boundaries between what is image and what is meaning. In this he perhaps shares with other existentialists the idea that words, for all their power, don’t make the idea of reality any more understandable, and the inherent failure of these words (and here we can include images, too) to reflect a sense of self.

Take a look, for example, at his series the unnameable, the title of which is taken from the third section of The Beckett Trilogy. Gone are the spidery, inky black lines; in their place he has introduced a cacophony of colours and gestural techniques that battle with each other across the picture plane. Schürmann makes these works on the floor, again not knowing how he will start. But in each of them, he builds layers of robust lines, squiggles and wide strokes of colour across the paper. These are intensely rendered marks, each revealing the physical act of their execution. The marks are raw and have nowhere to hide. Free but exposed. Some are thin and frenetic, others are wide arcs of colour that penetrate the layers. Within Schürmann’s formless improvisation are the echoes of the past. There are suggestions of Henri Michaux’s late coloured abstracts done at the end of his life; the lyrical abstractions of the Tachist Georges Mathieu; the seemingly child-like energy of Art Informel artist Pierre Tal-Coat or the performative abstraction of Japanese Gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga.

And what of the colours themselves? Some of the colours Schürmann uses seem to blend well with each other. We might see a subtle purple shade set amid a crisp light blue, the whole set against black. But then, into this palette he will drop toxic greens and sickly oranges. What is going on? Schürmann intentionally chooses lurid colours in order to subvert the predictability of how the eye might view this type of abstraction. He is not re-doing classic Art Informel or Tachisme but making his own path by injecting an element that threatens the harmony of the picture and adds to its identity.

And the result? Schürmann says that he likes the painting if it he is ‘irritated’ by it. This wish to present the irritation on the surface of the work reflects an honesty in his work – he wants us to see his weaknesses, because they show that he is human. It is a display of vulnerability and, as he says, part of a drive to ‘peer into every corner of human existence, to enter uncharted territory. To vanish. To lose myself. Every line a breath of air.’ His words echo Beckett’s own in The Unnameable: ‘...dying, living, being born, without any progress, without being able to yield, not knowing where you come from, where you are, where you are going, and whether it is possible to be somewhere else, to be different, without suspecting anything, without asking yourself anything, you can not, you’re there, you do not know who, you do not know where, that thing remains clear where it is because one day you started to listen, because you can not stop anymore...’[1]

Excerpts from “Starting from Zero” by Simon Grant, Collection Cahier d’artistes 2015 Pro Helvetia, Edizioni Periferia

In the exhibition at Rotwand, a number of photographic works and short films will be presented for the first time in addition to new drawings. Using his Super 8 camera, Schürmann filmed a number of his drawings and then selected segments of these images, which he subsequently enlarged and printed on photo paper as unique works. With the black-and-white photographs on view, Schürmann emphasizes individual details in the drawings that would otherwise go unnoticed.

After enlarging these selected sections of the images, he then scratched the film emulsion blank - an approach that he incorporates into his short films. On these “fresh,” transparent Super 8 film rolls, Schürmann uses ink and pen to draw short scenes suggesting interaction or reflection. Often a silhouette is used as a symbol for the human figure. Text and references to the work of Samuel Beckett can also be found in his films. Through the use of the photo booth as a presentation format, Schürmann creates a highly intimate viewing situation for the viewer, thus enabling an intensified experience of the work.

Ladina Hurst

[1] Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable Faber & Faber, 2010, p.86