Paintings as Offers for Interpretation

In one part of his œuvre, Tobias Pils works with ink and graphite on paper whereby white and the fragile materiality of paper are basic resources that are integrated in the compositional process. Paper for him is not simply a basis for work but integral compositional material and motif. White, untouched surfaces interlock with dense painterly zones, seducing the eye into seeing fictive spaces, landscapes and objects. At the same time, they also make it possible for us to become conscious of this moment of seduction. A fine web of sharply delineated circles and lines, like a fragile skeleton or subcutaneous mesh, either criss-crosses, outlines or even contrasts the transparent layers of wash. Sometimes these graphisms appear like pseudo technoid apparatuses or architectures in the middle of precipitous dream-like landscapes. On closer inspection, however, they turn out to be nothing but loosely assembled constellations of surfaces, lines and shadings.

To look at these pictures means setting out in search of a trail, taking up traces, concentrating them into configurations only to lose sight of them, assuming something figurative while seeing through its fictive structure. These pictures make one aware of how seductive the gaze is, to what extent it interprets signs and markings as representations, or how much the desire to recognize forms is an attempt at orientation despite all facts. Pils keeps this chain of associations in a delicate balance, raising it to the level of consciousness. We are thus confronted by works that bear witness to illusive and ephemeral connections and do not conceal them. By intentionally avoiding the explicit, these works convey that constant deviation from superficial solutions is most precise aim imaginable for a work of art.

As viewer of these pictures, one is not simply a passive consumer of idyllic representations but much rather a reader constantly observing and reviewing his own processes of interpretation. One could call these compositions painterly, graphic offers that have been handed over to the spectator, their goal being an inconclusive game of linking and unlinking aspects of interpretation. Pils acts like someone who knows well that definitions can be provisional, ambiguous as well as inadequate which he tries to inscribe into them in order to escape any hasty and misleading determinations. His pictorial form is reminiscent of incessant speech, or writing, which keeps itself in the balance, and whose content is its own imponderability and movement. This is why it aspires for transparency, lightness and variability. What the viewer gets to see is not a self-oblivious certainty that shamelessly forces itself upon him. To the contrary, it is a form of self-critical uncertainty nurtured by the knowledge that every lingual or pictorial expression is not simply a message but also a proposition placed within the unpredictability and uncertainty of the present and the past.

The meaning of the written or spoken text lies in the form or the sound of letters, words and symbols as little as the meaning of artworks is encapsulated in their physical form. On the contrary: while the interpretation and reception of this meaning becomes effective and changes within the framing conditions of society, every act of reception has a reinforcing or altering effect on these conditions. In the same way that an author or producer himself becomes a recipient the moment he reacts to existing traditions and to formal possibilities and those of the medium, the dependency upon the process of reception is also determined along with the production of art. In this way, every producer of art connects with a historical process, which he recapitulates and propels at the same time. His work is always both conclusion as well as proposition; its aspirations ultimately converge in an unpredictable sequence of sychronical and diachronical interpretations by others. Whether he wants it or not, every artist becomes involved in an open game from the very start and drafts offers with his works. He can, however, never fully anticipate how these offers are interpreted. Keeping the play with forms and their interpretation as open as possible, that is, to explicitly focus on them, is the recognisable intention in Pils’ work. This intrinsically implies that a sensibility for unambiguous mechanisms of the history of reception is allowed to flow into the production of the work. This means keeping in mind from the very start what will unavoidably be the case finally.

Incorporating perception and the processes of interpretation in the production of work, or even making them its basis means awareness for the relevance of context which is capable of transforming the meaning. This also indicates a capacity for taking distance from all visions of immediacy in art related matters. Poetry in Pils’ work thus lies not in the belief and dedication to a lyrical sense of pathos but in the distrust and the critique of such emotional conceptions. In the face of these pictures, the misconception that art is a medium for emotional outbursts, which must be conveyed with immediacy to an audience, becomes obsolete. To continue the comparison with language: Pils’ work is like speaking with and about language at the same time or distrust in poetry in a picture that is driven by naïve emotionality.

The belief that one’s own feelings toward works of art are the genuine qualities of an artwork is a popular misunderstanding. This is based on a way of “thinking” that overlooks or negates the determining role of contexts in the process of reception. Every resonance theory that is based on a distinct sender-receiver relationship as well as the fact that one can send autonomous and unambiguous signs whose message remains undistorted becomes exposed as naïve or predetermined when complex facts are being transmitted. Playing with meaning is not possible without the space between the sender and receiver, which permits and determines the possibility of transmitting messages. This is because meanings are not born and preserved in a hermetic vacuum. On the contrary, in a network with other fields, it is these fields modulated by interests and conflicts – to continue an exemplary argumentation – that are the sum of what we call society and history.

Not just his pictorial concept but also his relation to language characterise Pils’ creative mistrust of rigid rules. The words “vielleicht jetzt” (perhaps now) printed on the cover of the book which he produced with Ferdinand Schmatz and crossed out by a slightly slanting yellow line also seem to suggest that the intention of this visual game of definitions is to tip the balance between distinct ideas and fixations. When the indefinite and potential quality of “perhaps” melts into one single and figurative term in conjunction with the most pointed temporal fixation of a “now” that is simultaneously crossed out by a line, one could also see it as a paradigmatic positioning of mutual relativisation and claims of the punctually explicit in Pils’ work. Defining a “now” that is coupled with a “perhaps” can turn out to be an image of speech that relativises itself. It is thus also a critique of a naïve essentialism that robs itself of the possibility to keep meanings open so that it can preserve a sustainable form of possessiveness. The awareness of the relative value of meanings and the differences in interpretation as opposed to the same definition, that is, the artistic forms and intentions, is not to be confused with fatalism and resignation. It is, in fact, an expression of the attempt to avoid the trap of misunderstanding in order to attain lasting insights.

When language is incapable of conveying such complex facts with precision it is because the very same terms, that is, chain of arguments, are capable of producing different associations and actions in different recipients. Therefore, every attempt at precise communication is linked with admitting the possibility of failure. As commonly known, language does not realise itself by succinctly and flawlessly representing and explaining the non-lingual but by trying to approach it and to circumscribe it. Meaningful and serious speech is largely about purposive use of the inadequate, seductive and unreliable in language, about making it visible and keeping its statements transparent. Pils’ pictorial work is a contribution toward the sensualization of this dilemma and its representation in the medium of art.