Ein Wort, ein Satz, aus Chiffren steigen,
erkanntes Leben jäher Sinn,
die Sonne steht, die Sphären schweigen,
und alles ballt sich zu ihm hin.
Ein Wort, ein Satz, ein Glanz, ein Feuer,
ein Flammenwurf, ein Sternenstrich…
Und wieder dunkel, ungeheuer
im leeren Raum um Welt und ich
Gottfried Benn
Dieter Rübsaamen is a bridge builder between the visible and the invisible, enquirer and word former, artist and – as such – tutor towards parallel worlds. As a hospitable, confident and energetic contemporary he rather bears a middle-class life than the one of a bohemian – in any case a first glance makes us believe it. He offers coffee and tart in his cosy garden behind the house in a well-arranged typical Rhenish suburb of Bonn. He recalls how he said goodbye to his working life for seven years and illustrates this step into the free world with a photograph showing him next to a pile of folders. One asks automatically the question if this man has ever needed folders. He has long since turned his back on this phase of his life, although he had been lucky to work as lawyer in the cultural sector. This work secured his material existence, guaranteeing a relative independence. As artist he has always been free anyway.
Since then he has considerably more time at his disposal to meander along the paths of intellectual creativity through the often impassable terrain of (alleged) reality, of the here and now. As an intellectual he continuously refers to literature and philosophy – a feature constantly being mirrored in his art which, in parts at least, introduces itself as not easy to understand. Similar to our first conversation a couple of weeks before, he quotes Gustave Flaubert, Paul Cézanne, Friedrich Nietzsche, consistently recites Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as countless others. It seems as if every quotation, every thought and reflection convinces him to cast another of these anchors with which he positions himself in the impenetrability of the present.
He puts a plump loaded folder on the coffee table, not without stating that he could offer us just a fugacious impression of what affects him, bothers him, and stimulates him. He browses quickly through hundreds of articles on contemporary philosophers, littérateurs, and scientists. The amplitude of his interests and his ability to span disparate fields, to fathom the points of contact between such different disciplines as quantum mechanics, cognitive research / neuroscience and art is unparalleled. For Rübsaamen literature, particularly Heinrich von Kleist, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Robert Musil and Michel Houellebecq, and a preoccupation with the philosophical systems of thought have always been an inner necessity to survive intellectually and mentally in the factual world of jurisprudence. As lawyer he was on the one hand a creator in explaining words (legal texts), yet on the other a prisoner with the strict confines of law.
Dieter Rübsaamen’s œuvre does not offer swift solutions, least of all by means of cognition alone. It rather inspires one to question. Scripture and figures join with colour solids, lines with objects, abstraction with figuration, closed compositions with open image borders, lucency with density. He scarcely answers precise questions on settings, contexts and formation or even on the number of single works, dating or techniques – they seem to narrowing his thinking – to immediately recourse to the intellectual quality of Goethe, Heidegger or Husserl. Thus, unperceived by his opponent, he crosses mental bridges: similar to a visitor from the afterlife who brings to this life new ideas born from intensive observation and immediately turns them into art.
Rübsaamen’s concern, as Evelyn Weiss has previously stated, cannot be explained and decoded with a few sentences. Instead, one can only provide hints, indicate directions, and sketch structures to guide the observer to pose the right questions and not expect complete answers, for at best Rübsaamen’s work can be outlined. To present it in detail is impossible without doing the artist a severe injustice. His thinking is exceptionally complex, open, and oriented towards universality. Purest thoughts orbit the relationship between active intellect and material: He intends, says Rübsaamen, to uncover emotions and their impact. Material is a flexible element for him, and the visible perpetually is corresponding to the invisible. All visible is the result of acting invisibly, and the word is certainly enthroned above all.
It applies to the artist’s creation of what, to a certain extent, can be read in the gospel according to John about creating superior nature: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
His explicit reference to philosophy indicates the nucleus of his creation, as the painting expresses what is impossible to phrase through language and convey with words. Art is, from the perspective of Rübsaamen, inextricably attached to thinking, imagination, and language. He shares this appraisal with Joseph Beuys, René Magritte, Cy Twombly and other contemporary artists. Dieter Rübsaamen’s method passes via the language as he takes it: “In speaking we learn to configure terms which cast sensing and wanting in a form. First of all an inner form of thinking and cognizing is to be designed before the physical imprinting happens. I am primarily interested in the subject ‘beyond the language’, the barrier of language and cerebration as well as avenues of cognition moreover. Spheres in which sentiments, feelings, thoughts, unconscious and conscious engage.”
The two expressive media reciprocally amplify in the accord of word and image with Rübsaamen. Words are for him sculptural entities which he effectively embeds in simple drawings as well as in dramatic collages. The role of scripture, or traces of scripture, is not underestimated, indeed both act as content-transporting vessels and as purely aesthetic signs.
Of equal importance is the material which he works with and is herein presented as diverse materials. The term “materials” derives from “matter”, thus describes parent substance which is malleable and “impressed” by power and spirit. It is these formative energies that are being constantly detected by the artist to the extent that the term “materials” gains a pristine content, corresponding to his ambition to get to the bottom of the objects. He stands in dialogical exchange with the materials, facilitating their combined expression. He builds bridges with them between an invisible world and the visualising art, enabling us to straddle the limits of our perception and its enlargement through art.
Through his own art and the work of his contemporaries, Dieter Rübsaamen wants to arrive at new findings and help the observer to develop their experience of the relationship between intellect and material. He regards cognition to be an answer and thus questions the reality of the world by irritating through his works. It is exactly through this irritation that meaning finally enlarges the perspective, offering one of all imaginable (and unimaginable) answers: There is no exclusive and universal reality.
The bourgeoisie Rübsaamen confronts its counterpart in his studio crammed full of with art works and working materials; the creative chaos in which Rübsaamen’s impulsive vibrancy smoothly fits. This environment is adequate to his alert, continuously fishing and interrogating intellect and it is here where he seems to be absolutely authentic as artistic researcher and researching artist.
He shows us works belonging to a series, answers questions and presents, amongst others, some of his latest works: the CERN series of the group of works “To listen to the invisible” (p. 29-39), “On detour via Asia” (p. 43) of the group of works “Beyond the language”, the seven-part group of works with the cryptically appearing title “Azure solitude, Nietzsche cosmically thought in Sils-Maria” (p. 54) of 2005 and “Fluvial topography – unpredicted sudden frost” (p. 52) of 2007.
This part of his latest works is characterised by the use of radiograms by which they became multilayered in the genuine sense of the word, both in form and content. The radiograms, being the perhaps best established result of xraying technique of medical science, constitute an aesthetic artifice as well as a symbol. Rübsaamen broaches pictorially the issue of items being multilayered and the circumstance that everything we see could also take an alternative appearance, because whatever, according to Wittgenstein, we can describe at all could be other than it is (Tractatus Logico Philosophicus [T.L.P.] 5.634). Taking this into account, Rübsaamen asks what reality in fact is. How does reality look? Is art actually the adequate medium to visualise reality? Is it not rather the case that art produces its own, new reality? The artist, being equipped with a large affinity to natural sciences, is supremely captivated by these radiograms as visualised reality. They permeate the surface, visualise depth and are to be understood pictorially; metaphors for a meaning of art which moves behind the items. Dieter Rübsaamen ceaselessly and everywhere searches for the universal intellect which, back to all forms of material appearance designs, alters and in the end acts creatively.
Against this background, it may not wonder that temporally there is no linear development with Rübsaamen, by all means not in terms of a readable, continuous, stylistic alteration. Everything is there from the beginning: the word, the scripture, his specific colour priorities, his composition (e.g. leaving open the right above edge in most of his paintings) and the use of the numbering system of Wittgenstein’s basic text T.L.P. And as everything has been there from the beginning, nothing just ends. This explains disruptions in the form and content that become evident; when, for instance in parallel to the work “Floating – Namib dune landscape” (where it is actually about sand as example of “complex systems” in the sense of natural sciences)”, in both versions presenting perception, being comparatively close to reality and in formal terms virtually narrative, a trebly differentiated, with visual perception alone impervious, series like “Azure solitude” almost simultaneously emerges.
It roots in Sils-Maria, a short poem of Friedrich Nietzsche, which he wrote 1881 in Sils-Maria (Switzerland): “Hier saß ich, wartend, wartend – doch auf / nichts, / jenseits von Gut und Böse, bald des Lichts / Genießend, bald des Schattens, ganz nur / Spiel, / Ganz See, ganz Mittag, ganz Zeit ohne Ziel. / Da plötzlich, Freundin! wurde Eins zu Zwei – / – und Zarathustra ging an mir vorbei.“ Nietzsche met Zarathustra, the very character whom he later on (1882-1884/85) gave his voice.
Rübsaamen’s cycle is composed of the following parts: “Peak view”, “Ascent” (p. 45), “Quarreling”, “Exhausted” (p. 45), “Already earmarked”, “Traces in the silence”, “Echo – suddenly one became two” (which explicitly refers to the poem).
Referring to Rübsaamen’s image composition, the content of the poem is undoubtedly less important than the circumstance that Rübsaamen detects in Nietzsche (as in all other philosophers whose thoughts captivate him) a soulmate: someone who struggles, searches, scrabbles and creates (linguistic) images. The poem certainly cannot be retraced precisely in the paintings: they have not been designed as illustration. But who intends to do so, may detect the inner relation between art and philosophy. Whereas Nietzsche aims at providing an alternative draft to the presence, Rübsaamen poses himself the question of the possible, of the very reality whose existence he discusses in his art, but not pictures.
The CERN series with 9 single works presents only one part of the group of works „To Listen to the Invisible“ whose genesis dates back to 1992. The artist visited one of the largest natural scientific laboratories, operated and funded by 15 Western European countries, in the world for particle physics near Geneva in 1992. He was impressed by the unique complex of buildings, took pictures of titanic equipment, one explained to him how atoms are explored, he attempted to understand according to which regularities our world and the entire universe operates. Similar to the way famous philosophers touch him, how he feels is quasi mirrored in the complexity of the thinking, he finds himself here on a terrain where at the best he will conceive himself as interested amateur, as such permanently searching for inner relations, for the detail in the entire and the entire in the detail. And finally it is about control. The discoverer and innovator, the dreamer and the one at the same time lost in the universe is looking for regularity, systems, rules, structures, and laws in view of his own thinking which he seemingly senses sometimes as vast incident.
A demonstrative example of his complex thinking is the collage “Last Operating Space – White Hissing Everywhere – Humankind as Intermediate Result” of 2002. The artist integrates diverse cultural achievements, e.g. a sleeping protocol, a DNA analysis, an extract of Beethoven’s testament or a histologic transaction. What exactly is used here is of minor importance other than through reference to the exploration of the unconscious or to the genius Beethoven, whose death and – implicitly – music dissolves the points of contact with mathematics, philosophy and fine arts. What Rübsaamen says, paints or sketches is of enormous virility. One is struck by the fact that he seems to be overrun by the world’s variety and ideas which releases even his own internal variety.
On the basis of his artistic argument he provides a contour to his own existence as well as a structure and stability to the chaos of thoughts: a form of validation which appears strange in view of the libertine Dieter Rübsaamen primarily embodies – and yet had been articulated at an earlier stage, in the so to speak profane profession of this libertine. Art is one of his anchors in an eventful life, similar to engaging himself with philosophical questions that are be apostrophized as one of his anchors in his infinite cosmos of creativity.
With regard to this exuberant complexity being in the end the basis for his works, it becomes more understandable that one seldom attempts in articles about Dieter Rübsaamen to precisely analyse a single work, a series or a group of works. His work demands something different than an image-intrinsic procedure. Each single work is in principle composed of all central elements which are characteristic for the specific expression of the artist.
Dieter Rübsaamen’s art is constantly alert and thus young and fresh. His works appear versatile and communicative. They look for the spectator’s enquiring glance and invite him to research and traverse assumed borders. The task to be creator of the world, co-creator of and researcher on the evolution becomes reality in Rübsaamen’s works. He understands art from his perspective of a cosmopolitan enthusiasm as the second Creation, and formulates with it the invitation to pervade and experience the first Creation.
Those who engage themselves with Dieter Rübsaamen’s art world will become a walker being shown paths in a manifold manner of how an understanding of the world is to be linked to creating the world. New experiences are offered, in the end even ways out of the dilemma of the present, in which an existence without God evokes in us, reduced to materiality and banality, a sense for latent depletion and based on this the desire for meaning and background. A role of art is to enable oneself to experience the infinitum and, what is more important, to point out innumerable alternatives behind our world. Dieter Rübsaamen’s parallel worlds facilitate and amuse, provoke sincerity and arouse curiosity on the very dimension in which the artist virtuously moves and generates lightness – at the same time in a differentiated and wise manner.
Barbara M. Thiemann
Translated by André Müller and revised by Ciaran Morrisey
