COSME
Bettina Weiß considers her abstractions depictions of nature through geometric forms as they occur in micro and macrocosm. Lush in color, texture, and visual subtleties, her hard-edge paintings offer an exciting interplay of forms and colors created on wood panel surfaces. Alternatively lyrical and muscular the works on view offer the most cohesive understanding of the Berlin, Germany based artist’s current practice in the United States to date. Boldly geometric, Weiß’s paintings seek to amplify the language of abstraction. Utilizing both rectangular and circular panels and canvases, her affinity for prismatic shapes, circles and segments fuse with the high-keyed harmonic colors creating emblematic image patterns and fields. Suggesting Mandalas or other sacred geometric forms, the paintings resonate with rhythms and syncopations. Perhaps most evident in her ongoing series of small format paintings on panel entitled, Portraits of a SecretLandscape, Weiß generates visual possibilities for how abstraction might attempt to grasp the energy and complexity of the natural world – its magnitude and mysteries beyond language, but not recognition – in forms that are fluid, intuitive, or even magical.
Working unconventionally, Weiß combines both- oil paint and acrylics- indistinct stratums atop wood panels. Unlocked by the investigatory gaze of the viewer, her colorful transparent paints sit next to opaque ones, metallic pigments beside neon hues, and flat layers adjacent to thick areas reworked with pallet knives and tools to create haptic, cross-hatched or other textures. Discovering innumerable nuances of a single color, even on the tiniest surfaces, the artist creates paintings with a captivating visual experience.As Weiß states,” As a painter I am interested in the inner geometry of nature, which is reflected in all processes in the micro and macrocosm, processes that represent the entire universe, the abstraction of forces and movements of nature. I paint shapes with vivid surfaces, which allow the painting to vibrate and thus open the pictoral space. Patterns have always fascinated me as a kind of order system. I perceive colors very strongly. With compositions that resonate with me, I revise the paintings in many layers until I find forms that are dynamic and calm at the same time.Each painting is a self-contained system of a non-representational composition.I want to “load” the painting with a kind of energy through the manufacturing process, the composition and the choice of color.
COLOUR GAME
At the centre point, straight diagonal lines join together to form star-shaped angles whose individual elements seem to reach out of the painting. The interplay of opaque and luminous colours entices to touch the canvas and brings the square surface into movement. Just like with a kaleidoscope form and expression change with each change of perspective. Bettina Weiß’s expressive paintings are proof of how vivid and diversified the connecting of different points with lines can be. Bettina Weiß began her fine art studies in 1996 at Art University Kassel with Prof. Rob Scholte, changed toBerlin University of the Arts in 1999, and finished her studies in 2004 as a master student with Prof. Leiko Ikemura. Since the turn of the millennium, her work is being internationally shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In her work, she takes reference to the beginnings ofAbstract Art, whose trailblazers in the 20th century were the Norwegian artist Hilma af Klint, the Russian Frantisek Kupka or Sonja and Robert Delaunay. Originally starting off from the floral ornaments of far eastern cultures and Art Nouveau,Bettina Weiß develops in her new serial works a geometrical, systematic expressiveness. In a specially developed process she prepares multi-coated24x24 cm squares of solid wood and uses its inherent natural structure for her tape technique colour layering. With miniature cake lifter-like spatulas smooth, velvety, warm looking or cool metallic lustrous surfaces are being created. They are well-defined by their neighbouring elements, which simultaneously emphasize the interplay of juxtaposition and counterpart. The graphically elevated figures have grown from a small format to up to 150x150cm onto a rough, glue-coated canvas. The colour coordination of the acute-angled, rhombic or harmonically equal-angled elements grants spatial expressiveness to the geometric bodies, focuses the gaze, and allows to pause for a moment to dive into the depth of a surface. Bettina Weiß combines oil paint and acrylics, whose unconventional layering and reworking lets you discover innumerable nuances of a single colour, even on the tiniest surfaces. Glittering copper, silver or golden metallic shimmers behind classical crimson, ultramarine or Prussian blue. The texture of the wood shinesthrough and warms cool turquoise, whilst soft earthy tones or matt greyneutralise loud neon pink and orange. Crayons or pastel chalks dust over harshcontrasts and deepen or soften the applied colour tone. Imaginative letter combinations and echoisms title BettinaWeiß’s work: the series Lychen Bilder, Sun City, Yelle or Miramar stem from anintuitive choice of sonorous or unusual place names from all over the world,sometimes put into a paradoxical relationship as with Tropical Aspen. In thelarge scale paintings Bleep, Weep and Bing she simultaneously plays with comiclanguage and the expressiveness of meditative mandalas. Each image square explores the diversity of expression ofserial work in continuously new colours and shapes. With barely perceptibledeviations from her systematic alignment Bettina Weiß points at humanimperfection and the striving for completion. Each composition develops anenergetic existence, mirrors the essence of a mood, its origin, development andtransformation.
– Sigrid Fontana
A Break From The Speed of Time
For her new works, in which she has embedded a playing field of forms and colours, Bettina Weiß uses her chosen format of 24 cm x 24cm x 4cm, maintaining it serially throughout. The serial usage of format clearly suggests a reference to works of Pop Art in the1960s where this was a dogma which stood for the critical debate within the existing culture industry and its usage of reproducible images. The pop artists inclination to stylistic openness of the image was evident. The departure from a purely formalistic concept which ignored the world, was broken up by playful effects, content verbiage and abstract inventions. The British pop artist Joe Tilson for example mixes constructivist imagery with metaphors of “environmental language”, often created in puzzle form to a achieve a playful effect. Bettina Weiß' works have unusual names like POON, ELLESSE # 1, AMIN # 1 and draw a magical potency from her use of colour and form which suggest a mystical trait.They are reminiscent of far eastern Mandala symbolism, like The Golden Flower of the Chinese I Ging, whose geometric fixation of a central focus point stands for concentrated meditation and the unity of awareness and life.
The composition of AMIN # 1 fills the complete viewable space with single coloured shapes bearing a similarity to the Chinese game Tangram, a creative dissection puzzle dating back to the early middle ages. Just like in the game, where the shapes can be rearranged arbitrarily, the “rectangular closedness” generates an intellectual openness of perception. The space of perception is an open room to manoeuvre. In their time the cubists and orphists were primarily interested in the decomposition of form through a breakdown of light and colour impressions on the basis of the colour prism, in the visibility of movement and speed, dynamics and simultaneity. Preeminent in Bettina Weiß' works is the painting technique of an overlapping layered arrangement of glazed kaleidoscopic forms around a central focal point. The perception is additionally intensified by the use of extremely glaring pink and neon colours thus creating a space to extravagant, similar to the view through a kaleidoscope or the kind of creative process we experience while “playing”. The titles of the works are found constructions generated by “Google Maps”. The observer may repose there by fixating his attentiveness to something, or he may run off and break up the “who-turned-on-the-worlds-apps” with his spiritual eye.
–Jole Wilke for Tropic Aspen
Misty Molecules
For many years the artist Bettina Weiß has been dealing with the geometry of the ornament and its relations to pictorial space and the mediums of canvas and wood.
The basic modules for her paintings, which are assembled from minute geometrical forms, are the square, the triangle and the circle. From these elements the artist forms her own world, which might occasionally have a centre with forms emanating from it, which can even cover the entire surface of the picture, and/or fan out into smaller parts. The colouring of the individual fields is never purely monochrome, even if it might seem so from the distance. The impression of ‘graphic paintings’, however, is inhibited from the very beginning. Already through priming in several coloured layers a resistant surface is created, a diversified ground, which influences the colours that are to be applied – once with a glazing effect, once more concentrated, and rarely almost pasty. Particularly this resistance of the painting surface, in turn, promotes a more differentiated application of colours, since when the canvas is colour-glazed, more pigments cluster in small depressions and indentations than on raised spots. Through intersecting geometrical forms a spatial depth is created in the overall picture, which has an intensifying effect also on the next painted layer. The underlying forms show through as a result of colour-blending through layering, but also through accumulations of paint on the surface caused by the shaping edges of the framing tape: in front of these edges thin paint collects and when the tape is removed, a ridge of solidified paint remains. Due to the individual nature of its texture – wood grain, fissures, cracks and other injuries of the surface resulting from the manufacturing process and differences in the alignment of the fibres – the wooden base offers an invigorated surface, which is, according to the vision of the artist –disclosed, left almost transparent, or covered more densely with several layers of paint, almost negated. Thus, an exciting interplay of forms and colours is created in relation to the wooden painting surface. With each new layer of paint the overall appearance of the picture is changed, creating unrest or spreading visual tranquillity, and needs to be checked as to its raison d’être. Bettina Weiß frequently supplements these centralistic pictures with others which can be conceived as all-over visions, revealing only part of a constructed world that could be endlessly continued into space.
Here, one is tempted to say that the created all-over structure might represent a module for an endless ornament. In her centralized works the ornamental impression cannot be avoided. When multiplied, the repeated element would become clearly apparent, as the central geometrical forms are floating upon a coloured ground, which would generate their expansion into space forming a kaleidoscope-like pattern. The exhibition title Misty Molecules refers to the fact that the artist conceives the individual geometrical shapes as molecules, as minute constituents of a larger picture. In this current series the artist experiences a momentum of withdrawal. The colours appear as concealed by some kind of mist and reduced in their luminosity. The notion of sublimity and the contemplative nature of the picture are thus augmented.
Despite the visual language, which consists of many single shapes, the works of Bettina Weiß emanate a relaxed, free calmness and invite the viewer for a ‘walk with the eyes’, to lose oneself and become immersed in another world.
– Semjon H. N. Semjon