Everything is always wrong –Painting
Ulrich Wilmes, in Frank Dömer, Painting, Frankfurt am Main 1990
When approaching Frank Dömer’s paintings, the viewer encounters a pictorial world whose appearance is oriented towards abstract color/form relations.
The pictures he has created in the last two years show an examination of the structure- and form-forming processes of painterly abstraction, on the basis of a pictorial concept that rejects composition in the sense of a preconceived unity or idea of wholeness. In doing so, Dömer develops a range of different approaches that express thematic shifts in emphasis and formal variations on this still virulent problem area of artistic practice. Using the example of two paintings created in 1989 and 1990, these different variations in the realization of painterly abstraction will be described below. Both paintings „Untitled“ are abstract paintings, provided that they reject realistic models, i.e., they do not mimetically reproduce any extra-figurative objectivity. Rather, the image itself is to be recognized as an empirical reality that eludes visual comprehension. The visible can therefore only be described in a visual approximation as that which is created in the picture and brought to a unity that binds incoherent color structures into surface-related and spatial relations. So, what can finally be seen in Frank Dömer’s paintings?
The appearance of the first painting (oil on canvas, 190 x 140 cm) is determined by the dominant color tone of an iridescent blue-green that covers almost the entire picture surface.
Differentiated methods of application – with brushes, spatulas, squeegees – of the paint mixed in different consistencies – partly in a thin glaze, partly in opaque density – allow a multi-colored primer to shine through in places and at the same time deny the formation of shapes. In a few places, particularly at the lower edge of the picture, breaks appear in this all-encompassing veil of color, revealing this layering. On the other hand, the suggestion of spatial staggering created by the material superimposition is leveled out by the painting of white accents that contrast the diffuse color gradient. In contrast, the two traces of white visible in the center of the picture suggest a form floating beneath the surface, which is reinforced by a contour inserted with the brush shaft, thus asserting itself against the blurring of the blue-green paint skin. The pictorial form thus appears as the result of relational painterly processes. The differentiated treatment of color through layering, overlapping and painting gives rise to hints of formal elements that are largely dissolved in a compositional structure. However, through the deliberate distribution of minimized colour accents with an emphasis on the center, these processual structures appear to be related to the picture format and thus bound to the surface.
In contrast, the second painting (oil on canvas, 170 x 170 cm) has a decentralized composition based on structurally differentiated, sometimes luminous areas of colour, or rather zones of colour.
The upper part of the picture is clearly structured by five vertical color zones, whose border areas partly run into or overlap each other, thus counteracting spatial effects. The bright orange, painted with green trace elements at the right-hand edge of the picture and the blue-green zone in the center of the picture dominate the entire right-hand half of the picture. The two differ in their opposing styles. While the orange one is painted horizontally against a dark background, the blue-green one is applied with vertical strokes of palette knife, which are torn open in some places and reveal the black-orange underpainting. This vertical structure continues in the upper left corner of the picture with a gray, white and black triad, all three of which have a horizontal ductus with traces of green painting. These clearly structured color zones form a surface-parallel structure, into which a brownish-yellow painted structure appears to be integrated, shifted from the center to the left edge of the picture, which cannot be defined, but nevertheless stands out as a formal element from the previously described color surfaces through a plastic drawing. This is ultimately accentuated by the irritating element of the white circular forms placed in the transitional area, which weaken in their overlapping, while the broad painted areas below have a mediating function between the form and the surface structures. Overall, the painting thus visualizes a differentiated interaction of painterly colour and form structures, which are based on a pictorial composition in the sense of a coherent joining of incoherent units in the surface.
Both pictures, described as exemplary for the work of Frank Dömer, describe manifestations of painterly abstraction in that they refuse to trace the visible color and form elements back to representationally determined, extra-figurative models.
Dömer’s painting contains a release of color and the painting process and thus uses the conditions of painting as an object of reflection and representation. In this sense, it is a matter of pure painting, under the premise of an open pictorial concept that is oriented towards the prerequisites of processual unity formation, i.e., whose unity is not based on a compositional necessity, however defined, but rather integrates incoherent pictorial units into a relational context. This incoherence of the pictorial units in Dömer’s painting always moves in the narrow border area of latent transitions and immediacy of the defining, overlapping and spilling color structures. In this sense, Dömers painting thematizes its creation as a sequence of painterly processes controlled by decisions that obey an inner consistency, that is, whose elements come together in the picture to form a unity that cannot be grasped vividly, but only becomes tangible in the unprejudiced acceptance of its strangeness.
