BERLIN.- If she were an emoji, Sophie Esslinger claims she would be a tear. Both round and sharp, tears defy a constant shape or structure. What defines them is their constant state of flux—they are in perpetual motion, always shifting, evolving, and transforming. Just like whirls, storms, or stars, they are not static objects or fixed forms as we imagine them; these optical phenomena, and the analogies between them create a wide spectrum of possible combinations and arrangements within a canvas, and, beyond it.
Hard and soft; hot and cold; blunt and sharp; inside and out; up and down—these are only a few of the juxtapositions that Esslinger believes to constitute our world—or at least our perception of it. They expand, shrink and multiply with every brushstroke, and every new gaze.
Esslinger’s paintings set a stage for these contradictions to coexist, and for her specific vocabulary to form a narrative. But colors, shapes and sensations can hardly possess an innocence so pure as to mean only one thing. Instead, the multitude of possibilities that can be attributed to a shape—is it a tear, a drop of rain or blood, or a mussel; is it a mountaintop, a breast or an onion—is the driving force of her painting, and, one can say, of painting in general.
When Swiss artist Martin Disler closed himself off into the Würtembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart in 1981, he had one goal: to produce a very large painting. He worked on it for four days and four nights. Die Umgebung der Liebe, a monumental 140m canvas, instantly became his most significant work. Disler is certainly not the only artist who made a museum or gallery into their bedroom or at least spent a significant amount of time there; in fact, there are more famous examples in the realm of performance art. But for Esslinger, Disler’s work, on the contrary, demonstrates a definitive triumph of painting over performance.
A non-painter will never know how it is to see a painting like a painter, just as a painter will never see it as a non-painter; if one is set on making a distinction. And yet, as in performance and literature, so in painting, repetition produces difference, shapes and words form a narrative and meaning changes over time. For Esslinger, these are ideas that she picks up from books or art history, and recontextualizes them within the cosmos of her work.
„Du bist hier, um die Zeit kurz zu schneiden,“ are the first words of the play Schrei mich zurück in mein Innerstes All by Georg Timber-Trattnig. It is the play from which Esslinger borrows the exhibition title Tox Indigo, who is the main antagonist. As the play makes clear, everyone cuts their time short as they wish or at least as they’re able. Sophie Esslinger paints.
