Reflections on Silke Schöner's oil paintings
It is my interest to use a fiction of the real to make the unreal, the unnamed perceivable in the picture's white areas.
The presence of the realistically painted motives, snap-shots of public places, stands in direct interaction with the empty area. By means of this unfashioned space, movement is concentrated towards the motive or withdraws from the unbounded image space.
The extract of the real motive results from a reluctance to paint the inessential. Consequently, the composition of shadows, the penciled sketch, or even single unpainted areas remain visible in den pictures next to the fully painted fragments.
S. Schöner 2003
For me, the language of pictures is a completely gratifying method for conveying contents. The focus of the concept language of pictures lies in the nature of the picture itself, and uses the formulation of language only as a means to understand the communication. To me, the picture's development and the contemplation of my own work are not felt as being complete before this process is experienced as emotional and sensuous. Perceiving and experiencing at the real, the spiritual, and the imaginative levels are the entrance to my visual realm.
The subjects of my pictures are closely related to basic questions of ontology: What is reality? At what point does reality change? What is the difference in reality between the pictured reality and real life? How can I represent my inner world in pictures without simply making images?
As I don't paint the entire reality, the empty spaces are filled exclusively with the properties of my own reality. By using an illusion of the real, I attempt to make the unreal, the unnamed perceivable in the white picture areas. But how can I achieve this?
The landscape cutouts are surrounded by white. An undefined space. The white is an emptiness that is filled with whatever the viewer perceives. Even if the imagination conjures up sky, water or ground, the conveying medium (the whiteness) remains constant as a basic perception that is rooted in the immaterial and superposes the intellectual cognizance.This uncertainty triggers the search for a new orientation.Some viewers find it in the material reality through pictorial or conceptual association, whilst others find it by abandoning their experienced reality and entering a new, illusionary world.
The perceptions of space and time are closely linked, and mutually influence each other. If not all of the spaces in the picture are named, also the associated feeling of time becomes destabilized, and orientation within the picture must be reassessed.The experience of time is part of our self-consciousness. It arises from the experience of one's own continuous or the“flowing” development of one's being.
In my pictures, white space is created by omitting the material form, which changes the perception of space and time of the landscape and therefore triggers a new perception. This perception lies closer to reality – as experienced while driving fastin an automobile, for example – than reality permits me to believe. Although I am moving fast in the automobile from one placeto another, the landscape in the distance remains like a fixed image for my inner eye, and gives me calm.There is no longer any need to paint the sky or the street. The extract of the real motive results from a reluctanceto paint the inessential.
As explained by Gestalt-psychological principles, the picture's viewer supplements the gaps and empty spaces, thus completing the incomplete. Imagination fills the white space of the unpainted road with the tangibility or reality of a road, and – seemingly paradox – opens the possibility of making the absence of the existing road perceivable. The effect is not fathomlessness, but freedom of the spirit.
“Every perceived thing is placed in a structured relationship and obtains sense and meaning through the field effect of the whole,which is more than the sum of its parts.” (C. Scharfetter, psychiatrist)
Consequently, it is possible to change the expression of the realistically painted motive not by means of emotionally alienated colors or through form-giving abstraction, but to define it simply by omission.
In some abstract pictures, entities such as emptiness, timelessness or endless space (spatial perception) can be sensed; but my interest focuses on mutual relationships and the connection between reality and the spiritual.
Through the white space, I reach into the concrete motive without touching it. The shape, the objective image persists – nonetheless, the inner perception of the whole changes.
As a landscapes artist, I experience the development of an own picture (world) directly. I see myself fully involved in the picture, but who or what influences the final result cannot be determined. Of course, contents, atmospheres, and ability can be the subject of discussion. But at the point where language stops, where philosophy and psychology approach the intangible, it is the artist's aim to use colors and canvas to picture the leap into other dimensions – to represent it, make it perceptible, and to become the material cornucopia for the spiritual.
S. Schöner 2006