Gerda Meendsen

A landscape without end

When Alfred Kubin finished his novel "The Other Side",he had completed the tale of a wondrous experience. When the filming of the book based on the novel started, the search was on for a suitable setting to render the mood and atmosphere expressed in words. It was found in Prague. Kubin, the painter, expressed everything in words: the light of the other world, the strangeness, the breath of death, the unknown, the unachievable and the hope which could not be put into words. And still, everything somehow seems normal, silently encapsulated in itself. For the observer, the fascination lies in acting as a witness. The reader becomes a visitor, a traveller, a silent observer who - as if in a dream - finds himself in an enclosed world. And he follows the tracks, although he does not know where they are leading, and hardly notices that it is actually he who is becoming distanced from himself. Kubin does not set his readers free, but practically forces them to search within a city that has no horizon.

On his return to this world, the observer is aware of his greater awareness of the elements of his own life. He takes note of the questions of artists putting forward social matters for discussion - in some cases with the intention of applying a critical eye to the topic from close up or from the broader point of view. Tests and experiments cannot provide answers, but can only point in directions. For the most part, they only go halfway before getting tangled up in the snares of the conditions they have set for themselves. But what if there are no questions asked or there is no telling of happiness and grace or revenge and loss demanding our attention? Then not much of this world remains. The atrocities of man are not even up for discussion, the interventions and destruction of nature are blanked out. Stupidity takes a break.

And now to the work of Gerda Meendsen: Just like Adam, the observer is reborn into a different world, placing one foot in front of the other, on a desert floor, sandy or ice-covered, water courses in front of him, surrounded by dunes, with no trace of people, no matter where he looks. Yet everything still seems to be alive, to be breathing, as if his visit had long been anticipated. Almost as if in a delirious dream, the observer feels his way forward, covering wide areas, with plains stretching out ahead. The eye glides like a bird in flight over a global landscape that leads into eternity. Light and unleashed, a part of consciousness is detached and floats off into the expanse of space on invisible wings. The brilliant darkness of the sky holds promise of a long flight with no destination. The journey would seem to be the destination.

In the Middle Ages, artists created paintings which called the observer to prayer. Saints stood to the left and right of the Virgin Mary's throne, demanding humility and sacrifice from the believer, and as deserving witnesses they held out the promise of salvation and perhaps even redemption. Then man began to ask questions about the nature of things. The firmament lost ist solid base. The representatives of the church began to fight these new perceptions with every means at their disposal and reinforced the propaganda in their preachings. People, peasants, beggars and workers suddenly saw themselves kneeling before the Madonna appearing directly before them. Salvation in a picture had never been as close as it was in the time of Caravaggio. The painting drew together the image of the world, the street, the here and now, with the promise of eternity and redemption.

And what happens today? Where are the witnesses of salvation? For many people they have served their time. But who is there to provide an answer to people's questions? There can be no answer from the ego, trapped in its own mortality. Only in the eternal is everything possible. It may well be that the path in this direction leads through the paintings of Gerda Meendsen.

The blue-black sky in her paintings allows the observer to draw fresh hope - hope of realising that he is not lost. Even if aspects of earthly existence such as change, decay and death are to be experienced and suffered - as the abstract structures in the paintings suggest to us - everything is still embedded within a whole, extending out into the distance. In some cases the observer will find references to earthly life. Vague, half-decayed, hardly born and overgrown with organic structures they appear as mocking laughter deriding man's longing for the romantic. There is much that meets with rejection - saints included! But the chance of setting out along the way is preserved. This is the offer, placed in the picture, to follow the path representing the search for meaning, suitable for everyone ? but not taken up by all. A path which is unconditional, but which requires purification. Deserts are a triedand- tested means of achieving this. Meendsen paints desert, not saints ? however just as it always has, the path leads to the eternity of creation.

DR. VERONIKA BIRKE,
ART HISTORIAN,
VIENNA