FARBEBEKENNEN

PORTFOLIO DEEP WATERS – Living the paradox

The hero’s journey begins in the zone of contradiction. Let us delve into the theme of Matriarchal Aesthetics.

According to Heide Göttner-Abendroth, artistic visualizations should be understood less as completed statements than as pictorial byproducts of self-exploration within an ongoing process of self-realization. This perspective also resonates with the DEEP WATERS series, which I situate within the field of frequency painting. For this process, I have developed a particular technique that allows me only minimal control over the artistic outcome. The placement of the colour droplets is the only element I can determine. The painting itself is created through wind, rain, and other external forces, including sound frequencies. Once the ink has dried, there is only one question I ask when looking at the image: What is looking at me? A communicative dance with myself begins. It provides orientation within the cycle of the seasons and, at the same time, guides my relationships and my artistic tasks.

It is an attempt to live the process of Matriarchal Aesthetics. Yet the publication of these pictorial by-products generates a contradiction that I have been exploring for more than 30 years. What remains of a life-related practice in painting is ultimately an image. We ascribe artistic hypotheses, concepts, and intentions to it. It also becomes an asset. What has been continuously developed through self-research and insight is now fragmented, systematized, archived, exhibited, offered, and sold.

Through their externalization, Individual Mythologies and the processes of Matriarchal Aesthetics encounter a necessary limit. The outcomes of these processes must serve a purpose. They fulfill a function: to preserve the identity and sustain the existence of the creator within the collective narratives of post-industrial society. The active individual is constantly confronted with external contradictions. To develop, one must show Farbe bekennen — one’s true colours.

This articulates what Joel Blackstock, in the context of C. G. Jung’s work on the shadow, refers to as Living the Paradox. To grasp and move through contradictions is to encounter the deeper meaning of each myth and to give depth to art.

“Ultimately, the Jungian path of individuation asks us to embrace and live the paradox of the opposites, to hold the tension of contrary forces within the crucible of the self. This is not a matter of attaining a static state of perfection, but of engaging in a dynamic, ongoing process of differentiation and integration.