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[April 29th 2003]
Interview
Troels Wörsel
Between Zen and Semiotics
Interview with Troels Wörsel
According to painter Troels Wörsel, a
painting is always a mere sketch for another painting. It can’t
be definitive, true or false. The world is a frighteningly complex
project under constant revision. This is what he strives to communicate
through his conceptual, but at the same time tangible painting practice.
Interview: Lisbeth Bonde. Photo: Thyra Hilden. Translated
by David Duchin.
Troels Wörsel
New Paintings
Galleri Susanne Ottesen
Gothersgade 49, CPH
Tue- Fri 10-13 & 14-18, Sat 11-15
4 April - 3 May 2003
www.susanneottesen.dk
Painter Troels Wörsel (1950) has lived abroad since
1974. First in Munich, then Cologne and for the past five years
in the Tuscan city of Pietrasanta on the Italian west coast.
But while most Danish artists living in self enforced exile keep
themselves going by selling art to the Danish market, Troels Wörsel
has taken a different approach. His CV is witness to this with its
long list of solo and group shows throughout Europe and the USA;
and his gallerist is Munich based.
For Troels Wörsel, exploring and experimenting with the possibilities
of the canvas’s flat surface are the focus of his work. His
paintings are full of signals, texture – and radically different.
They’re full of visual white noise and filled to bursting with
beginnings and tests. The paintings fluid material stiffens, in
that it soaks up elements of the world around it, and the painted
surface is anything but a window through which the viewer can see
the physical world. It’s an object, full of signs, a physical
manifestation of expression. According to Wörsel, a painting
is first and foremost a painting, and not an echo of reality. And
prior to anything else it might do, the painting has to surprise
the artist first. Wörsel’s paintings are on the one hand
deeply complex, yes, they’re heavy with their place in art
history. But on the other hand they’re floating, lightly, and
bear the mark of immediacy as though they were created for the moment,
released the second that the painter released the paint brush. In
Wörsel’s work, his “sketches for paintings,”
you’ll find both semiotics and Zen, never brick solid statements
kopenhagen.dk met Wörsel at Galleri Susanne Ottesen, where
he’d just opened an exhibition of new painting, painted on
the back of the canvas. These humorous paintings – occasionally
in strong, monochromatic colours, portray mirror images of textual
work, which when combined with the visible frames present us with
the ‘backside’ of his practice. The text and subtext have
traded places, and the painting has really become just a thing on
the wall. The painter plays with the relationship between the painting
as object and its function as message conveyor or projection surface.
And Wörsel himself? He looks like a relaxed, slightly worn
rock musician; but he shines when he talks about his art.
Troels Wörsel and
Lisbeth Bonde
What interests you as a painter?
I’m interested in the tradition of the European image through
time – and in the modernist painting of the 20th
century, from cubism to what we have today. Admitting that the painting
is a flat object with physical limitations has been something that
artists have pointed out again and again and explored in different
ways throughout the last century. Many painters have believed that
they’d solved the problems created by painting, but I don’t
think that’s possible – though it is possible to find
new questions. Morris Louis, for example, thought that he’d
solved the problem of the flat surface because he’d found out
which colours could be sucked into the canvas and become part of
it. That was just a step in the journey. But painting can be so
many other things, so there can be no concrete solution. Only questions,
and in my new work I deal with the painting as a flat object. The
fact that you only see the back of the painting is a new step in
the process that the cubists started when they began painting pictures
of flat things like newspaper clippings, wine bottle labels, playing
cards and music. In abstract art, the flat surface is experimented
with by – when not being read as an illusory space – the
likes of for example Kasimir Malevich, where the black square is
often interpreted as floating in space. The 20th century
has been witness to a multitude of attempts to solve the flatness
of the painting. The fact that the painting is a flat object hanging
on a wall. Other examples of ‘solutions’ have been Jasper
Johns’ flag, in which the image is identical to the thing it
represents – the American flag; and Frank Stella’s black
and silver pictures, where the bands of colour follow the form of
their blending is another example of an abstract attempt at solution.
Think of the use of silk screens which you can see in many artists
work, for example Roy Lichtenstein and Sigmar Polke.
Troels Wörsel: New paintings,
Installationviews
You’ve worked with that media yourself.
Yes, in 1985 I created a series that dealt with the issue of
silk screening. It’s a classic: silk screening.
They refer to all the mechanically reproduced images surrounding
us in this modern world of mass media. The fact that we don’t
see reality, but merely an image of it, when we look at for example
photography. It occurred to me that a silk screen is not a mechanic,
inflexible object, but in fact a quite impressionistic thing, like
when Monet paints a part of his garden. The silk screen’s image
depends on how long the repro film is lit. We can also use finer
or grainier screens. Instead of painting the screens over, like
other artists do, I painted them orange and afterwards touched them
up with a paint brush in black so that it was blended with the orange,
producing contrasting areas on the surface of dark and light. Then
I projected through the screen, and painted the points thicker or
thinner, depending on whether the background was light or dark.
In that way I could create the same effect as a repro camera. It
became a part of the motif. And I called attention to the arbitrary
nature of the silk screen. The fact that the screen is just as dependent
on motif as the Impressionists were – that It’s a sort
of “impression imprimé” – Wörsel laughs.
You’ve tried, through the years, to de-fetishize the artwork
and swear off yourself from the elevated role of the artiste.
I would say that I’ve never tried to live out the role
of the artist. It doesn’t interest me. I’m interested
in pain from a more naïve angle. You could say that these paintings
are anything but naïve, but that I have a completely uncomplicated
take on myself. I don’t follow any strategy, nor do I think
that the role of the artist inherently contains some specific status
or responsibility.
Troels Wörsel: New paintings
You work with Zen and concentrate on the present, the now.
Yes, but all painters that are really interested in what they do,
and who posses a degree of quality, know the fight to attain total
attention and concentration on the moment, while at the same time
avoiding thought and debate about whether what they’re doing
is good or bad. The only thing you know as a good painter is that
you are one with what you’re painting. You don’t stand
there thinking: “now I’m painting something important,
this is an important historical event or it’s my beloved woman
or whatever.” It doesn’t matter what you paint. What matters
is the energy that is transferred from the painters, through their
brush, onto the canvass. I’m interested in Zen-Buddhist painting,
where immediacy is all-important. In this kind of painting, a standard
motif is employed – quite banal motif – like the circle,
the triangle, the square, etc. The work depends entirely on whether
you can find the pure expression.
But do you create illusion in your new paintings?
It’s the back of the canvas, so it’s pretty real.
It’s a real frame, a real canvas stretched on it, etc. But
it’s also been my intention to create an image that portrays
a painted picture. That’s true for all painters, they create
works in progress, despite the fact that they think they’re
making the definitive product. What we thought at the time was the
ultimate form of expression will later be “overtaken”
by something else.
Troels Wörsel: New paintings
You use prefabricated colours and do monochromatic work in strong
colours or black and white.
Every now and then, since the time when I concentrated my production
on making food pictures (mid ‘80s, LB) I’ve been forced
to use colours. These pictures were so complex, while at the same
time semantically well defined, so that the viewer could see what
was going on. The various elements of the picture wouldn’t
come forward if I hadn’t introduced a colour. It was orange,
an artificial colour not associated with nature. When the black
is blended with the orange, the orange stands out, whereas blue
fades, and yellow becomes green. In the blue-yellow-red images,
the colour was dictated by the material at hand: a German road map,
and also by references from Mondrian and other classic, abstract
art. But my images don’t belong to any specific family of colour.
The green I blended up myself, and all the other colours came directly
from the tube. But, colour is important, because the viewer has
to see the white gesso of the canvas, then the colour, and then
the drawing, the motif. The process has to be accessible. I’ve
used colours that entertain me, and that have been technically possible
to read in relation to the black.
Where do the names on the signs come from?
The names are bathing areas on a coastal road in West Italy,
where I live. First I made 8 pictures where I used the names the
right way, but then I got the idea of turning them around. When
you reverse text, it becomes more obvious that the painting is facing
the other way.
  
Troels Wörsel: New paintings
Your paintings posses what some have called ‘thought heavy
sensuality’. Or both reflection and immediacy. What drives
you to create your art?
Everything depends on the painting, and the painting should
entertain me. Of course, it’s even more interesting when you
can touch subjects that have something to do with painterly or philosophical
issues, but the painterly is always in the centre of focus. Art
can’t be based on philosophy, philosophical thoughts can’t
be translated directly on to paintings. But all kinds of things
influence the painting process – from the fact that I paint
with my right hand, which affects the direction the image is read
in, to the things that appeal to me in my life. In my food pictures
there is an allegory of the painting, a consciously chosen reference.
In these images I explain something quite complex with the help
of everyday things – that a fluid substance, the sauce, could
be refined and finally take on a physical form. And making food
is also something I know something about.
According to Jacob Wamberg the line
is the cross section of reality that the artist works with;
filtering is the transfer to the artistic universe, while mounting
completes the process of forming the symbols. In these paintings
we see dripping, stiffened, frozen, silk-screen like, shining or
digital substances that float before us. Today, 20 years after their
creation, they seem ultra modern, as though they were painted by
young artists of the 21st century, and seeing them it
is easy to understand the respect that young artists have for Wörsel
today.
Troels Wörsel and Lisbeth Bonde
What does Marcel Duchamp mean to you?
Duchamp is, as you know, well known for many things, especially
his readymades. But he’s especially interesting because his
work is so over-laden with meaning, as if he’d written a huge,
complicated novel, and that goes for his readymades as well. Without
that intensity of reference, they’d be much less interesting.
But more concrete, I’ve been quite interested in The Large
Glass, and its contents as well, contained in the green box. In
this piece, Duchamp separated form from content. If you haven’t
read his notes, then whatever you might say about its contents is
irrelevant. It was very interesting, I felt, and my food pictures
are presented in the same way in a little book that tells the story
of their content, while the paintings convey the form. These paintings
were created because I was tired of the developments taking place
in the new, wild painting that had become banal.
Troels Wörsel has painted since he was 15-16 years old,
which was when he changed – characteristically for a boy in
puberty – his name from the Danish Vørsel to the more
international and accessible Wörsel. He is self taught, but
after exhibitions in Copenhagen Robert Jacobsen invited him
to Munich in 1974, where he stayed. Robert said “what you’re
doing is modern, old boy, but wouldn’t you like to do it in
plastic?” At the academy in Munich, BASF had donated a workshop
where everything you could think of could be made in plastic. Wörsel
acclimatised quickly in the Bavarian city, despite his rejection
of plastic and love of painting. He was soon rewarded for his enthusiasm
thanks to the famous gallerist Fred Jahn, who had good international
and museum connections. One thing led to another.
Troels Wörsel: New painting
What did it mean for you to come to Germany during that period,
when the country was setting the trend for the West Europe art scene
and American artists were being shown there before landing galleries
in their homeland?
That’s why it was important for me, and that was why I
felt I had to be there. But Munich wasn’t Cologn or Dusseldorf,
where the really new things were happening, but there were still
many good galleries in Munich, so I stayed for 8 years. I stayed
in Germany because I felt more at home in a place where my work
was understood. And when you earn as little as I did back then,
it was impossible to survive in Denmark, whereas Germany was bearable.
I supported myself in various ways, like doing graphic work. I might
have quit painting if I’d stayed in Denmark.
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