In the Cosmos of the Evident
The paintings of Tobias Pils against the backdrop of a metaphysically inverted visible

Regardless whether of textual or visual nature, messages have always strived to call attention by professing to disclose something. It was claimed that, empowered by whichever circumstances, we had the authority to make freely available messages that the valued public had had no access to previously. This act of making public subsequently created the hue and cry that has up until today been so easily mistaken for the very content of the message. Even art history has often enough boasted of having deciphered works of art from the renaissance, of having identified the portrayed persons by finally understanding the clues concealed in the pictures. Great insights were first promised in the style of modern investigative journalism and then, in a dramaturgically selected moment, public attention that has emerged from a growing polarized and focused curiosity was accused of seeking justification for this mise en scène. In the hope of finding a message capable of solving the mystery of the universe, we are willing to insist on a constitutive Messianism, a state of elusive existence that is dependent on the hermeneutic wonder, on the arrival of a message in the form of a universal key or code. Postmodernism, of course, tried to make the only healing announcement in this waiting room of existence, namely, that the doctor has already gone home. However, it failed to announce whether he will be treating again, which is why the patienthood conditioned to wait is left with just one recourse: paranoid self-treatment. Everything could mean something here, but what?

Modernism’s emptying of the image led to abstraction, which in turn developed strategies against this impudence. These strategies can be described astwo typological lines: tirst and probably the more general one, promised a new message for a concurrent and radical withdrawal of the visible. The old trauma was thus repeated, but was at the same time also aesthetically apostasised, which at least neutralized any disinclinations. The recipient approaching the pictures with the senses “fully turned on” is shown the faintly structured or monochromatic planes of colour and is invited “to see” the invisible lying behind them. This ‘display’ corresponds perfectly with iconostasis, making it seem like a captor of hope, like an auto-suggestive or hypnotic emptying out. It attains its true artistic significance not so much by imitating a sanctified mage policy but much rather because it places itself in a calmed zone of perception at that moment in which media noise has reached an unbearable pitch. A second variation of abstraction, clearly differentiable from the first, is the one that Pils has in mind. Far from promising the viewer what is hidden in the background, it discloses the universe, i.e., a cosmos universis claimean open, a non-latent eity with that hano escaess no inway outotoile The viewr is shown an one image, only one image, not only because there is an agreement that is internal to painting, has an interneement thatmagest connect/relater and thatrofessional viewerspectatold may nev or ask for meanings external to painting. He In fact, h rather shown e because he so posed to rethe visible says says everg about itself. Tobias Pils’ paintings do not trymaket whatsoever to excel themselves in solving the mystery of an image or in announcing proe correct references (and saying to say what thry so-caltors visit gallery so to speak linamely,, “This remind me a lot of Rothko, . I can see e strong influence of Agnes Martin, . there Thiss r reference to Barnett Newman”), but . To theary: they try to prevent exactly precis athis dison of the image of the image wrk of relations and contexts of the image.eby blocked out is not the visibility of the image but its readability, its resolvabilityd its annulmenation,t, bying shted to other images and their meanings. This does not mean that the painter desires to complete his paintings in an exquisitely solipstic form of solipsism,ill, in an autistic state. This does not mean that he is at arms with communicability and appraisal, it simply means that he sees that the differentin in art itself can itsd to an ever faster creation of a net of signifiers net around theual inventions and lame it by making the eyes slidslipe awaym thm and rush fromto the next onvtual links and to the oe. This process can perhaps be understood as an effect of order of the vthe order of art, of the system of signs, but this does not excuse its most disastrous effect, namely, the impossibility of seeing this picture. Here, it can only be a painter making an objection. The others, artists drifting along in the stream of signifiers, profit from the fact that we do not see their works but only reflexively reely to their relevant catchwords. Tobias Pils expressly rejects such forms of relief.

Strangely enough, Modernism was meant to give shape to the theory that the visible is the secret itself. The new ideals of transparency overtook with great ease the archaic aesthetics that were committed to veiling, concealment and the cryptic. Since then, attempts to bring the things out into the light, to literally expose them (ex-position), have not ceased. One wanted to see the three times larger Hermes proclaiming, “What a blessed show… to see all this in one single moment… the invisible made visible… this is the cosmic order and this is the order of the cosmos” for “the Lord manifests himself everywhere without malevolence.” And this is precisely why Giordano Bruno demands that the infinite principle of the world be given its infinite representation. From this point onwards, the crypts, the secret chambers, the obscenium (the chamber behind the stage) began to be emptied; the curtains were drawn up and everything that was not visible so far, what one should not have seen (always), now inhabited the shrines of glass and ultimately ended up on the monitor, the technical glass or showcase.

Making possible something that would have represented a first class perversion for the medieval sensitivity must have been the first modernist movement: the exhibition of a saint, exhibiting the bones in diaphane. A bright, glaring light has been turned on where once darkness ruled, in the protected sphere behind the veil, where we had presumed a mystery below the surface. What was thus far invisible can now be looked at, ogled, examined from all sides. Opacity and shadowiness had, however, been for too long a time the trace – the index – of the real from which the seductively open made vain attempts at drawing away attention. And the fact that seeing still does not allow itself to be aroused – as it should be – by the visible, but actually continues to expect disclosure. An enlightened public that has obviously come to terms with the “camera lucida” [the bright chamber] is whispering about the hope of profundity, of the existenceof meaning, in the depths,at the back, in the realm of the invisible.

The philosophical evidence is quite unequivocal: the resurrection of phenomenology and existentialism, the re-reading of Henry and Martin, who, with their concepts based on the logic of the image, were so decidedly associated with epiphanic metaphysics, with the hymnic metaphysics of light propounded by great scholars, pervades Modernism’s programme as far as the attempts made by a logic of the manifest to undermine the Messianic intentions in the act of seeing are concerned.

The importance of Tobias Pils’ paintings and public art projects (such as the not realised MORGEN/ Und wir berühren uns auch aus der Ferne for the Upper Austrian Government Services Centre in Linz) that possess an unequalled conceptual eloquence can only be understood in the context of this protracted state of incomplete or semi-Modernism, in the context of this confusion of offers made to our perception, although they rob the viewer of the possibility of being in touch with the usual (narcissistic, rational) treasury of interpretations available to the art lover or expert rather than with them.

In fact, they even enter a race to establish a closed system with the viewer, whereby the viewer’s embarrassment over not having anything to say about these pictures forces him back to seeing. Even possible associations with American Abstractionism are a shot in the dark, as are also connections with Colourfield Painting because the paintings usually do not possess what we understand by colour (an unsolvable mystery that only exists for its own sake). The pictures are mainly black and white and produce a compositional chain of associations by emphatically showing NOTHING, not even the modern trap of a general grid of parallels. Contrast is the result in which lines, planes, seemingly incomplete passages are against all forms of graphisms. Is something becoming visible? Perhaps it is Phanes, Light, the mystery of the illuminated.