Turning the Tides
Wide stages are revealed in the paintings of Charlott Weise (Görlitz, 1991). Wide stages, or rather, force fields. Souls traverse the canvas as dream entities and apparitions, on their way to visionary encounters with each other and with us. They beckon you, on the swish of a wing- stroke or the whirling of an all-consuming, honey blonde wave. Sirens’ song echoes in the distance, you hear it in a corner of your mind, a song roused in a mist of color. Weise works in the wake of these beguiling nymphs who, half-woman, half-bird, trapped sailors with their song and arousing whispers. There is a difference, however. Weise transcends the mythological role model. She moves past the delusive character of the Siren as femme fatale and finds a way out of the waves of fate. With the fluid flexibility of oil paints she defies and twists the inevitability of predestination. Nothing left in her hands will smash on the cliffs: everything flows in a continuous state of change. The streams of paint are those of matter, melted into gold.
Weise is an alchemist. She is also an action painter, slinging the dynamics of her own movement onto the canvas. The size of her canvases is no coincidence, testament to the range of her gestures. The women emerging from the depths on the rhythm of the golden waves and the swishing of the wind in their hair, are certainly no clawed birds of prey from the waist down. With their long legs they may walk straight out of the paintings, on hands and feet if they must, with their backs raised in temptation. They stimulate the sense of touch, yet are elusive as a mirage. Such is the way everything drifts apart: Weise unveils a world of physical suggestion akin to a cloud cover, distant from earthly reach and earthly matter, out of the bounds of gravity. Earth pulls on the body, the moon pulls on the water. Ebb and flood, day and night: in the light of change, temporality and transience, Weise combines the sublime and the banal, high and low, in a curving landscape full of metamorphoses - an epic in picture.
Five large paintings reveal themselves together as a monumental frieze. The work is a thrusting fertility throughout, filled with esprit: an ode to bodily lust and lust for life. The paintings hang close to each other, as pages in an open book, so spacious that as a reader, you might get lost in them. Thanks to the rhythm, deep contrasts of color and the dancing dynamics, this ‘leporello’ suggests sheet music. It is both abstract and figurative, at a high level of virtuosity. It reads as a libretto for an opera, operetta, ballet or even an oratorio. In Weise’s hands, unmistakable ecclesiastical iconography and a breath of religious mystery excellently combine with scandalous masquerades from cabaret. Or: a glance through the keyhole. Her imagery is fraught with femininity as a source of life. The emergence of the individual fluttering like a butterfly from its chrysalis is readily contained in the title Herself in Passage (2020). Weise presents us with a selection of alter-ego’s as archetypical personifications of earthly and heavenly mutuality of life. The fluid, feminine energy takes turns appearing as pregnant spirit, angel, film star or pin-up, nun or mother-to-be, giving birth with her legs spread wide in the arms of her sister nuns in their virginal apparel. Oh là là! Breathe in, breathe out.
It is almost as if Weise has exhaled her own air into the paint. A breath of air on which red contour lines of sleeping spirits can contrast themselves in an intense blue environment. The deepest ultramarine, as in a lucid dream. And then it all fades, indistinct, as in a cloud of condensate.
‘Painting is like writing with more freedom, because language limits abstraction,’ said Weise in an interview in 2020, having been awarded the Royal Award for Modern Painting in the Netherlands, including an exhibition in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, which featured part of her pentaptych. Her painting reminds of writing with a nimble hand. On the rhythm of form and color, images are strung together as lines of text. Herself in Passage is inspired by a novel by the Ukrainian-Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977): the Sphinx of Rio de Janeiro, as her biographer called her. Lispector’s book The Passion According to G.H. tells the story of an artist who, startled and disgusted by a cockroach, seeks to become one with it, giving in to reflections rich in sensual experiences. Weise says: ‘You could also describe my pentaptych as a trance in which different scenes are played out at the same time. Characters fade into each other and melt, only to later resurface in other beings.’
Her theatrical individuals seem to force themselves through the canvas, the curtains swinging open, as if this was always meant to be. They are comparable to the gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, who, according to famous sculptors, had only to be freed from the marble. The hint of marble mystery is contained in Weise’s work, though rather in the abstract way known from architecture. Her pentaptych is a frieze that stretches the wall like slabs of marble might: the split layers of stone mirror one another, their veins forming symmetrical formations overflowing with suggestion. Livre Ouvert refers to such a concatenation of marble slabs: open book. Charlott Weise is a master of marble quality. Her lines escape the rules: they change, dependent on our projections and interpretations. All of her images move to the flutter of our eyelashes, or those of the wink of a super star.