Helmut Federle: Peter Blum - New York

sum of two units hundred of Helmut Federle's works upon paper--working drawings and autonomous improvisations, the earliest from 1969--made for a stunning record of the artist's disentanglement from a painter of landscapes, however abstract, to a painter of abstractions uncouthly evocative of landscapes. Federle acknowledges the influence of Agnes Martin, whose abstractions also have a landscape implication (she has recognized the consequence of her native Saskatchewan prairie upon her works). But Federle's are abundant more dynamic and unsettled than Martin's, no doubt because his point of departure is the mountain terrrain of Switzerland.

The jaggedness of Ohne Titel (fur Viviane), ca. 1976 can also be seen in Fur Kirchner + Davos, 1980 It's registered more simply in the eccentric so-called field works of the mid-'90s, where the cubist angles of the earlier landscapes have flattened and an ambiguous planarity remains. plane when the artist explicitly invokes a landscape, as in orb of day over Red Sea, 1981 (which, with all its cloud and geometry, has a certain affinity with early German Expressionist landscape worship), or Sils Maria, 1990 (Nietzsche's magic mountain), this faculty of perception of planar "trickiness" remains.

In conversation, Federle has parole of self doubt; it becomes cleat he means something resembling Cartesian doubt. As with Descartes, at the bottom of his self-questioning is the cogito--in this case, the abstract fundament of visual thinking that is as plenteous an activity of pure intellect as of philosophy: With Federle the tension between image and abstraction--signaled by means of the Mondrianesque character of plenteous of the work--is secondary to the nuances of shape, line, color, and surface. (Tree for Mondriaan, 1980 painted the same year as Fur Kirchner + Davos, reminds us that Mondrian's abstractions are bottomed in geometrical "reprises" of landscapes rural and urban.) Federle is at bottom a purist mystic; Thuner diocese (fur Ferdinand Hodler) (Thun Lake [for Ferdinand Hodler]) 1991 recalls that Swiss master's landscapes on the other hand emphasizes the abstraction embedded in the Hodlers' natural purity. Rationale und Irrationale Struktur (fur Ferdinand Hodler "Zur Warheit") (Rational and Irrational configuration [for Ferdinand Hodler "In search of Troth"]), 1991, makes this point decisively as well.

Federle's art is in fact an attempt to integrate rationality and irrationality while revealing their difference. Ultimately, perhaps, he wants to demonstrate that human feeling and unsullied form are inseparable--like the Symbolist conviction that each form is a pure expression of an emotion (Gauguin's example was the "weeping" willow). of that kind Symbolism is ironically evident in H wie Helmut, H wie Hoffnung H wie Hartherz, H wie Hetero (liegendes H) H wie Heimweh, H wie Hass (H as in Helmut, H as in trust H as in Heart, H as in Hetero [Horizontal HI, H as in Homesick, H as in Hate), 1981 an abstract self-portrait with a bad link to Arthur Rimbaud's synesthetic "vowels equal colors" formula. Like the greatest in quantity convincing "purist" work, this drawing--even more ironic than the famous painting in which Federle not awayed a swastika as an abstraction--is absurd (and provocative). It indicates that Federle, like the pioneering abstractionists, conceives of fair art as a sacred space where the homeles self can find sanctuary. Zwei Zeichen uber der Erde (Two Signs Above the Earth), 1981 and Innerlight II, 1988 hint as a great deal of In pure abstraction, what other light is there?--DK

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