The dominant landscape tradition in East Asian art is called shan shui, or the mountain and the water. In addition to describing his main subjects, the term also indicates the specificity of his medium: the fluidity of ink. In traditional paintings from China, Korea and Japan, black fluid flows like water through intricate compositions imbued with serene atmosphere and material succulence. Helmut Federle’s recent works display a clear affinity for this genre, both through their color palette and their humidity, while circumventing such overt association through the process of repeated accumulation and erasure.
The exhibition features a group of relatively small abstractions painted between 2020 and 2023 that are predominantly black and white, accented by occasional sections of green-tinged yellow or warm beige. Totally non-objective, the depth of the canvases comes from traces of paint applied and then erased, producing a permanently blurred and wet quality. Take Bird Migration at Azusa-Gawa River in Winter, 2022: The center is dominated by a horizontal band of watery gray paint interrupted by vertical brushstrokes and highlighted by thicker black paint around the edges. Is a landscape implied? The title, referring to a river in Japan, certainly suggests one – or did the artist appeal to East Asian pictorial conventions to explore the viscosity of paint?
The pieces on display evoke the feeling of being immersed in a water-rich landscape rather than rendering a specific place or geological form. This approach also indicates a connection to East Asian aesthetic philosophy, as these classical paintings rarely depicted actual locations, relying instead on gesture to convey a naturalistic ideal. West and East Asian arts influenced each other throughout modernity. It seems that Federle developed elements extracted from this style and filtered them through the modernist language of gestural abstraction to produce a new visual syntax, offering a distinct contribution to the ongoing synthesis of artistic traditions.
