Helmut Günter Weis
From the use of materials to object-like material
Prof. Dr. Peter Anselm Riedl

Conserving impressions from a journey - that means following the urge for selection. What has been perceived with a corresponding sharpened sense under the condition of a change of air cannot be stored in the memory and retrieved from the memory as a continuing process but only as a chain of memorable and emotionally fruitful situations. Within a branch of art that is no longer subject to the traditional copy principle, the decision if the recalled by the individual can be important intersubjectively is made by the capacity to filter characteristic formal and chromatic structures,

For the painter Helmut Günter Weis from Weinheim, Germany, a journey to Russia became an event with consequences for his art. It was both the curiosity of the artist and of the connoisseur of horses that led Weis to the Northern Caucasus late in the summer of 1998. The generous landscape, the grounds of the former state-owned stud farms, the horses of the sometimes rare races that are being bred there and last but not least the hospitable and open people gave origin to imaginary pictures where reality has been conserved as well as annulled in its directness. A chapter of the early history of the art of abstract painting comes to mind where the exotic alliance of landscape, horses and horsemen play an important role: It was Wassily Kandinsky, who led nature, human beings and animals more and more away from being recognizable in a series of impressions, improvisations and finally in his "composition IV" of 1911. He turned them into elements of colour-form-inventions, nonetheless reminiscent of their original shapes. Any kind of abstraction that is not completely free of the associative (as for example the Concrete Art), is finally obliged to follow this tradition, theoretically and practically founded by Kandisky before World War I.

Weis, who mainly feels close to the informal and here first of all to Emil Schumacher, wants his picture cycle "Die Reise nach Stavropol” (the journey to Stavropol), incomplete as to writing down these lines, to be understood as free notes of external and internal experiences. The artist, who has acquired a remarkable spectrum of means of expression after autodidactic beginnings, is not afraid of big formats nor of resolute gestures and of the use, at times at a massive scale, of different materials. However, he also appreciates the well planned construction and the retained coloring.

lf a broad picture, being dominated by geometrical brown areas, introduces the Stavropol series, an attitude is being expressed that is binding also to a lot of other works of the series. in competition with the relaxed big format there is however an agitation shown in various ways: the areas break open by layers and dynamic brushstrokes, by symbolic sprinkles and by the use of materials like corrugated cardboard or ropes. The colouring is deduced from the colours of the Caucasian landscape, according to the artist, and from the colour of the fur of the Achal-Tekkin horses, the ropes insinuate the ties of the horses. Comparisons of this kind are yet not being feit as isolated narrative information, and also the word Stavropol, written hastily onto the cardboard, is a natural part of the picture composition.

In other pictures the use of materials can increase to even reach object-like dimensions. On the eighth picture of the series there are applied to the canvas next to plaster and corrugated cardboard aluminium boards, on the tenth picture, structured energetically, you see next to other materials wood and ropes. Again Weis makes commentary links to reality - to the metallic shimmer of the horses' furs in one case and in another to relicts of archaic cultures, without meaning an expressiveness that would have to support forms and colours. In pictures like the ones exhibited here or in others, that focus more on the compositional dynamic and the colouring intensity - Weis proves to be a designer who knows how to give a decisive lead to the concreteness and immediate feeling over the literary and calculated elements.

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