Udo Nöger: Paintings

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is thrilled to present Paintings, an exhibition of new work by Udo Nöger.

An opening Reception will be held on Thursday, February 6, 5:30–7:30pm.

Djinnscapes: Recent Paintings by Udo Nöger

By Mark Van Proyen

Udo Nöger’s studio is exceedingly clean and fully suffused with natural light that pours in through large windows. It is perched atop a small mountain near Temecula, California, looking out to and beyond the vast Anza Borrego desert. There, the air is crystal clear. Summertime temperatures routinely top 100 degrees. From the vantage of that studio, one can sometimes see rippling optical illusions caused by the refractions of light interacting with heated air rising from the sun scorched flatland. These phenomena are called mirages —illusions that have no real connection to reality. Mirages tell us something about how tenuous our visual relationship with reality can be, especially when we substitute constructed images or other forms of second-hand information for reality itself. As always, we are reminded that we live amidst a now-we-see-it and now-we-don’t proposition, that being the consensual illusion that we call culture.

Nöger’s new paintings revel in that kind of perceptual conundrum. The largest are expansively scaled to evoke barren landscapes. Light is their clear subject, understood as both phenomena and symbol. Less obvious is what they say about the relationship of light to tangible form. In these works, tangibility is revealed as a mere glimpse that disappears or reappears when we come close to their surfaces, subject to changes of our angle of view. These shapeshifting effects are caused by the addition of dimensional structures located behind the surfaces of Nöger’s works, creating subtle protrusions. These are built into the support structures of the paintings, creating undulating surfaces that disrupt the flatness of their picture planes. This effect is enhanced by the fact that Nöger paints on the back of his canvases so that the frontmost layer is backed by succeeding layers of acrylic paint. He uses mineral oil as a medium, allowing for translucency and unusual dispersions of the pigment. These factors allow the oscillating picture planes in Nöger’s paintings to catch and reflect light in delicate, irregular ways.

Shifts in tinted color can be noticed on the sloping contours of these surface irregularities, some tending to warmer hues and others moving toward cool. The subtle shifts evoke what optical scientists call a Ganzfeld effect, a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when the brain is deprived of visual stimulation, filling the absence with neural noise. A practical example is when we peer into a sandstorm or a thick fog to find ourselves unable to determine whether we are seeing a surface or an indefinite space. Coming or going in either direction, the result is a ghostly evanescence that apprehends presence without being able to comprehend it as any kind of specific object. If and when we see friends or foes, we see only what we are predisposed to see.

The peoples of North Africa and the Middle East believe that spirit entities called The Djinn inhabit their worlds. Usually invisible, the Djinn are powerful shapeshifters able to manifest themselves in a multitude of forms. They are neither angels nor demons, although we might fairly say that they are hybrids of both. In common folklore, Djinn are capable of assuming human or animal form and are said to dwell in inanimate objects—stones, trees, ruins—and underneath the earth, in the air, and in fire. They are everywhere and nowhere at once, visible only as fleeting glimpses existing in the interstitial spaces between the far horizon and the tip of one’s nose. Even though they are masterful studies in evanescence, Nöger’s large paintings also give their viewers a window into places where the Djinn might dwell.

In addition to the more expansive works, Nöger also presents smaller paintings that are materially similar and representationally more specific. The major difference between them and their larger relatives lies in what first seems to be a dark pictograph that lurks near the centers of their picture planes, looking like the residue of some kind of ancient inscription. Closer inspection reveals that they describe glimpses of semi-figurative shapes arrested in a state of frozen transformation, part pictograph and part ideogram. Are these descriptions of the Djinn captured from the peripheries of our field of vision? Maybe evocations or conjurations are better words than description, but there is something there that is also not quite there. Nöger’s paintings bring those mercurial things into the here and now, all-the-while keeping their essential spirits alive.