Art Gallery - Gallery Deweer, ART Gallery, art gallery, artists exhibit, exhibit graphics, painters, photographers, sculptors, sculptures, sculpture to Otegem

Norbert Witzgall - Nose is a Nose is a Nose

06 November - 11 December 2011


Painters, with their anachronistic need for isolation and their attachment to ‘métier’, have rather become exceptions on today’s artscene. This is certainly true for Norbert Witzgall, who concentrates on one single genre: the portrait. However, by researching its possibilities and testing its conventions, Witzgall takes the painted portrait far beyond its traditional intentions. In each of his works a system of references, of stylistic and iconographical choices is at play. In other words, in Witzgalls oeuvre the portrait ceases to exist as a genre, and becomes a language. As an iconographical basis for his works, Witzgall appropriates all kinds of portraits, borrowed from carefully selected photographic source materials. His choice evolved from pictures of glamorous Hollywood stars found in magazines and photographs of relatives he only knows from the family album, to filmstills from classic cinema or self-made portraits of friends. This appropriation process often involves an omission of redundant pictural elements and a quite faithful, almost accademical imitation, as it were, of one or more features of the original portrait. Often, Witzgall also uses collage to assemble the composition. Some aspects of the way he builds up his works however, betray a more complex, contradictory attitude. Within one and the same pictorial treatment, Witzgall not only idealizes his subject but also questions the medium. He ‘accepts’ and reveres the subjects of his portraits, and enhances their visual and psychological impact. But he seems to remain skeptical about the autonomy and significance of painting and photography in general. Driven by the melancholy of someone who wants to embrace but keeps a distance, Witzgall creates portrait after portrait. They are marked by a tension between passionate surrender and cool irony, and they breathe enigma, romantic unease, and psychic ambiguity. Like the unforgettable Dirk Bogarde in Visconti’s ‘Death in Venice’, Norbert Witzgall only touches with the eyes. And hides behind the many other ‘persons’ he portrays. As to why he does this or, in a broader sense, as to what drives and generates Witzgalls works, there is a striking analogy with yet another masterpiece of cinema, the art Witzgall loves so much. In ‘Persona’, a highly influential experimental film from 1966 by Ingmar Bergman, a nurse talks incessantly to an apparently healthy but always silent, female patient. By lack of reactions or answers to her questions, she takes over the patients role, and gradually ‘becomes’ her. The process ultimately blurs the outlines of the two protagonists’ personality: they become each others mask or, in Greek, ‘persona’… At the end of Bergmans film, the camera turns around and shows the viewer the one and only truth: the crew. For sure, Witzgall is just as obsessed with the relationship between viewer and artist, or image and picture, as Bergman. In Witzgalls work, this obsession is split up in micro-relationships between fascination and denial, fiction and memory. Maybe Witzgall is also trying to disappear into the portraits he creates. Be that as it may, Witzgall developed an unusally fascinating language, at times reminiscent of the Biedermeier epoch, pop culture, dada, and surrealism. Within a wide array of methods, some return frequently. The degree of accademism and precision in the way photographic images are transferred to canvas for example, is often countered ironically by the use of out-dated painting techniques. Witzgall also tends to temper his own obvious love for painting by fixing materials to the canvas, like dadaist poetical quotes. In several works, strokes of colour cover part of the surface as if the artist felt like disturbing the image or, on the contrary, as if the image weren’t enough and something was needed to enhance its effect. And if there is a space or perspective within the painting at all – the figures are often held in a non-descriptive space – it is mostly distorted in a way reminiscent of folk art, or simply impossible. As a result of this approach, each portrait becomes an equally important fragment of Witzgall’s personal mirror. Rather than stereotypical samples of one and the same signature, Witzgall thinks of them as interchangeable parts of an ever evolving, equivocal image system. This in turn defines his exhibition practice: at Deweer, just like in other shows, Witzgall will arrange his works into ensembles. Part of the works have recently been shown in a four person show at the Kunstverein Nürnberg, the rest is new.