Works °20 — ANITA GROENER

interview by Rutger Pontzen; intro by Liberato Santoro-Brienza

ISBN 978 0946641 505     32 pages (paperback)    20x15cm   18 illus

Anita Groener’s work provokes a search for meaning and invites the viewer to participate in her personal journey. In the book it becomes clear how she tries to bridge the connection between emotions and artistic technique, and talks about her continuous search for a ‘fresh palette of innocence’ with which to paint the world as she sees it. 

EXTRACTS

"All the works by Groener, through their free play of evocative and engaging free associations, invite the viewer to join in a journey of exploration into the imaginary, the only possible real, the world of dreams, the subconscious: in search of deeper, more subterranean landscapes/ inscapes beckoning from behind the doors and from the end of the corridors of the psyche. But all this is said, in Groener’s paintings, with a gentle light touch. Nothing is overdone, overstated or self-indulgent. Quite to the contrary, these paintings express a great sense of sincerity, a remarkable degree of artistic and personal honesty, the humble courage to face the uncertain and the unclear. They also convincingly suggest that the artist has great faith in art. In their fluid, floating elements like organic tissues, Groener’s paintings are animated by a gentle tension, an inward pull, a poetics of in-scape and in-tension. It is impossible to isolate any one element from within the whole landscape, map and visual field. All the pictorial elements fuse symbiotically, to produce a soft oneiric atmosphere. There is a sense of expectation – something is going to emerge. You can almost hear the colours: a whisper, a murmur, a sigh, at times a muffled short cry... And when the artist scratches the surface of her paintings, you know she is again questioning reality. Still searching, for also the painting itself is not perhaps real enough. In her faith in art, in her courage to search for the real, Groener knows well that – in the words of Ernst Bloch – ‘all is a sign, and surely the sign can only be realised in infinity’."

— from the introduction by Liberato Santoro-Brienza

"There should first be something on the canvas to set me off. An empty canvas is useless to me. Even the first strokes of paint offer no solution. They are a beginning, nothing more than that. You can compare it with the way a composer goes about it, taking a few notes as a starting point and playing with them. The same holds true for me. First I put a few dashes of paint on the canvas, born out of a certain mood, and next I react to them. I never have a precise, clearly defined point of departure. I used to sketch on the canvas first, but the sketches never matched what I had in mind. It’s not necessary, and to be honest, I don’t even like the idea. It is precisely the inconsistencies, the spontaneous events during the painting process that I find interesting – for instance, when I lose control over my brush when trying to draw a straight line. I still draw sketches, but more to analyse the composition and organise my thoughts as I go along... 
         I want to pose questions in my work, not to give answers. There­fore you get fragmentation, because I don’t have the answers. You cannot buy a handbook for living. I try to find answers bit by bit, but they remain fragments, as with a jig-saw puzzle with many pieces. I’m scraping away layers of paint off the canvas, trying to unveil images which are hidden or lost underneath. It’s like peeling off layers of frills and garbage you have collected over the years which obstruct a clear, honest view of one’s own self. I paint in order to search for answers. It’s not that I think about this rationally when I’m painting; I don’t think about anything when I paint. There is silence. It is a kind of meditation."

— Anita Groener