The Secret of the Surface

The Art of Wolfgang Walter

 

When Wolfgang Walter creates a picture, energies are released that at first sight have nothing to do with art. He splatters the media onto the canvas, he scratches and scrapes, he shakes, wipes, and sprays, he scrubs and brushes and strokes, standing up, sitting down, kneeling, on the floor, at the wall, at the table. This is the way Walter works. He forms the canvas surface in its stretcher – a special acoustic event in itself – then he steps back again, thinks awhile, only to dive at the picture once more in order to modify what he has just done, develop and fragment it, pile more layers onto it, cut it up. As he works, Walter oversteps by far the bounds of painting, and a genuine spatial depth comes into play, relief, a fragile, haptic quality. It is a process that starts with an emphatically material approach – paint, sand, size etc. are rapidly and violently applied onto the canvas – so as to create a basis, a powerful, valid surface. The actual work consists in modifying this surface through a treatment of its own material premises, until the artist has transformed the canvas into a state that he defines as “picture”. At this instant the work is finished. No other modifications are carried out.

This is a process-oriented work method, based on trust in one’s own possibilities, on the confidence of doing the right thing at the right time. No prefabricated concepts and considerations control the creation of the picture, but spontaneity and a high degree of subjectivity. Walter’s pictures are the incalculable results of processes that throng out of his inner being and assume form.

Yet Walter is no action painter. He maintains a firm context of fine-tuned control to dominate all his work, a blend of experience and joy of discovery, monitoring things as if from far away. His artistic method is guided by an intellect that contains itself, knowing that something really new can emerge only in this way. This is a central element in Walter’s art. The unknown, the not yet seen, the not yet experienced must have place in his pictures, a fault line, as it were, that owes its existence to the accelerated drying process of two incompatible materials; parts of the picture, therefore, that result from the encounter of will and chance, that are consequently not controllable at the outset. If they have become controllable, in other words transferred into the repertoire of the artist’s means of expression, they can probably be directed towards a goal, but are no longer innovations.

Far more than compositions in the strict theoretical sense, Walter’s pictures are sculpted surfaces. The compositional element for him consists in the necessary organisation of the individual surface components, the supporting structure into which the sensations are hinged; it is merely the access to the inner essence. The composition is the uppermost surface from which one starts out in order to be able to get into the depths. This is why for Walter it plays a role as important as it is subordinate. You need it to get into the picture, but then you leave it behind …

And set out on a visual trip into the geology of the picture. Wolfgang Walter succeeds – and his pictures express this – at least in provoking the question that is always associated with the concept of surface: what is behind it, what is under it. A surface never exists just for itself alone, it is always only the visible part, concealing what ought to be concealed. The illustrious iridescence of this interplay is not solely a philosophical game; for Walter it is the visualisation of quasi physical processes. That “weathering” plays a great role for him is not surprising. Wind, rain, cold, heat stress and erode outer walls; with time, no work of human hand can resist these elements. Walter imitates these disintegration processes, he accelerates time and lets his self-made surfaces “age” at dizzying speed, not in order to pluck out their mysteries, but – on the contrary – to charge and load them as vehicles of an immense abundance of mysteries.

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To capture Wolfgang Walter’s pictures in photographs is a challenge. Simple reproduction might do justice to the composition of a picture, its overall appearance, but can convey little of what it is actually about: the extension into spatial depth. This is why detail shots were taken of a number of pictures, allowing a glance into the “inner life” of the pictures as well as the extraordinary surface qualities that are of such pre-eminent significance in Walter’s work. Special light conditions were created to focus on the plasticity of the forms and their colours. Photography is nothing other than a certain way of seeing. These photos to a certain degree imitate the potential of the human eye in diminishing distance, in entering into the picture and taking an exploration trip through it. The photos at least have the aim of arousing interest, because they naturally cannot replace an encounter with the actual work of art. Whoever takes the time and hence establishes an intimate approach to one of Walter’s pictures will see that when he or she again takes in the totality of the picture, the perception has changed and the appearance of the picture is a new one.

Dr. Peter Laub
Art Historian and Photographer
Salzburg, November 2008