Helmut Dorner’s almost organic sculptures are concerned with the continuities and ruptures of forms in space. The unrefined plaster, showing the roughness in the material, the fingerprints, the areas of white or gray paint, render the sculptural volumes self-evident as well as fragile, as if they were simple molds. Negative forms, they are also as much removed as possible from the object, for they are the works of a painter; they are a stage in the artist’s approach to the pictorial surface.
Dorner’s paintings over the last several years maintain a clear relationship to three-dimensionality The wood panels onto which the canvases are glued vary in thickness; they can almost function as frames. But these frames do not serve the traditional purpose of isolating or separating; rather, they interfere in the viewer’s perception of the pictorial plane, which has been differentiated through its three-dimensionality. Very often arranged in diptychs and triptychs, Dorner’s paintings are the result of different techniques. A first group is characterized by thick painting, betraying Gerhard Richter’s influence. But where Richter composes, Dorner allows the paint free reign to depict an abstraction. In a second group of paintings the saturation of paint is so intense that no discrete image is apparent.
The third group is in some ways the most spectacular: between the two colors, sometimes opaque and sometimes diaphanous, in hard lacquer, very simple motifs appear They are repeated on the surface at a distance from one another so that they never dominate a canvas. The fragments of a much larger scheme, these motifs are never organized into a composition that can hold its own. If they give the impression of having emerged only accidentally from the surface, it would be only to separate or remove themselves from it.
There is no question of eclecticism here, but of as many approaches as possible to a single reality—a reality that avoids all explication and commentary. If there are obvious breaks among these three groups of works, their techniques favor interaction rather than contrast. Dorner’s work is dynamic, always shifting from the formal to the structural levels. Not using an external pretext, and staying close to the potential of its own inherent configuration, the work is constructed of itself alone, modifying each time the frame of its limits. Painting is Dorner’s subject, but through an approach that is as uneasy as it is assured, his work does not fall into the traps of self-reflection and formalism.
—Alain Cueff
Translated from the French by Hanna Hannah.
