Luc Besson filmed the movie “Le Grand Bleu – The Big Blue” in the mid 1980s on the French Mediterranean coast and thus created a masterpiece on the obsession of an apnoe diver who aimed to explore the inscrutable, the invisible of the sea. O2 being carefully stored in his pulmonary alveoli was the means to support his expedition. At the same time, the artist Dieter Rübsaamen based in Bonn exhibited his work “Art thus gets dirty”, an œuvre intending to inspire art with an oxygen bottle in order to detect the last secrets of reality.

This desire for the invisible, the complex, the real, the possible and the seemingly inexplicable constitutes the leitmotif of Rübsaamen’s work – almost of a getting as high as Besson. He has developed over the past decades a distinct ability to listen to the invisible, to incorporate elements of these often hidden processes and to present them in paintings. The reality is explored as reality and the possible is presented as perception in his groups of work(1) and in his collection of finished and unfinished photos which are displayed for the first time in this exhibition. Rübsaamen thus interprets the understanding of the unknown as a constant of human existence.

One group of works – certainly the most complex one – brings together in an impressive manner the different aspects of Rübsaamen’s work accomplished over the last fifty years. A visit to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva at the beginning of the 1990s opened new dimensions for Rübsaamen; here he commenced his expedition to the invisible, the understanding of invisible processes as well as the presentation of their awareness and interior views experienced its conceptual and visual breakthrough. Everything quasi achieved clarity in the darkness of the experimental facilities. The way from the big bang to the consciousness was a quite short one.

Using the style of the Informal, by the 1950s Rübsaamen had already started to look for the defective, the invisible. Present, discovered structures were perforated, different layers of information were superimposed and thus new contexts explored – quasi in an area dissected for the continuously searching Sisyphus. At first he used string bags, printing plates of addressing machines, rubber blankets and radiograms of body parts – quasi human findings – followed then by radiograms of elementary particles (elementary particle showers) in order to “listen to the invisible” as once stated by Charles Rump.

Rübsaamen founded in the mid 1980s the Free University of Emotion Techniques (FHE) and created together with Thomas Ungar the “Emotional Standard Meter” as its product. This happened at a time when he realised that apart from the active search for traces of living and organizations, emotions in particular infiltrate our memory and perception and thus strongly influence our discernment. With regard to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus, Rübsaamen’s work of that time presents completed, encrypted facts: paintings can be read and words can be viewed at. The words thus draw back to the reverse of the paintings. Scientific findings confirm today what Rübsaamen has known for years: the human being reads and the brain thinks in images. The symbol is thus gaining expressiveness as a stylistic device in order to provide the processes of listening to a sculptural expression.

In that respect Rübsaamen acts similar to Ecke Bonk who experimented with symbol systems as interdisciplinary expression of art, natural science, typography and philosophy and thus reflects conditions and contexts of cultural achievements. As self-appointed typosoph, Bonk aims at exemplary presenting these systems.

It is in the stress ratio between representation and reality that Rübsaamen has been continuously working and it will certainly dominate his future work too. The ambiguity of symbols is exemplified in the painting “Tschechow and Tolstoi on Crimea in 1903 looking at an animal” (p. 19) where two figures are depicted as outlines: Tschechow resigning and Tolstoi being vigorous.

The group of works „Emergent systems – interactions“, whose core issue has been on Rübsaamen’s agenda for quite a long time, has just recently been completed. It is about interactions and emergent and complex systems being dominated by forms of cooperation of its elements. It also touches upon the question how contexts and structures as well as their elements organise themselves. Rübsaamen reveals these inner contexts and connections and presents them as paintings, completely in line with what Paul Virilio once described as aesthetics of disappearance.

Rübsaamen gave excellent aesthetic expression to the principle of self-organisation with his group of works on Namibia in 2004. Dunes are as granular examples of emergent systems a natural phenomenon which occurs through the complex interaction of its components, in this case grains of sand. Brigitte Falkenburg, an elementary particle physicist and philosopher, has pointed out for some time that the issue of reality requires a centre of reference being outside the professional area, in this case physics.

To interpret and explain the decamped structures, the invisible listened to requires a language. This is what the general opinion might be about, though language is not to be handled like that. Wittgenstein closes his tractatus by saying “What one cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.“ Rübsaamen questions this; he perforates this silence by creating through his paintings a means with which those contexts can be articulated where language seems to be overextended. Rübsaamen has visualised in his group of works called “Azure solitude” this ongoing orbiting of the other status, this never-ending desire – consequently the doubt gnawed on. Thus, anticipation is the determining factor, the rest is enigmatic.

Rübsaamen does not resign though, instead he looks beyond the dominant culture. In doing so, he chooses the detour via Asia (p. 43) to better understand those seemingly indescribable statuses and to present them adequately with his image language. François Jullien describes it accordingly: “La grande image n’a pas de forme.” It is the Asian art where the notion of accomplishment is abrogated. There, it is more a fundamental openness allowing not only to explore a new world but also to understand the old one in a new way.

Reflecting once again upon the paintings of the CERN group of works it becomes clear that these constitute milestones of Rübsaamen’s communication beyond language. The art historian Volker Adolphs declares Rübsaamen’s paintings to be painted language critics. Its aim would be the understanding of the relationship between reality and its acquirement in various human dimensions. Art would be cognition, not illustration. This also explains the blank space being often present in Rübsaamen’s work – the respectively free edge on the right upper part of the painting. These blank spaces form areas beyond the appointable, the pictorial.

The works of Rübsaamen often refer to the tractatus of Wittgenstein. They as well shape the work of the linguist Manfred Bierwisch (p. 21) who also referring to Wittgenstein presents through his work questions of how cognitively and culturally scientific origin may interact. The sentence of the tractatus “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” is of central importance for both. The existence of forms and limits beyond language is proven for evolutionary-biology by Bierwisch and artistically by Rübsaamen (2).

Rübsaamen’s work is located in border areas. His paintings straddle the inner and the outer reality of man so that they cannot be taken as one side more than as the other. These are the paintings with which the sciences design reality and which cannot be perceived sensuously. These are about theoretic models being developed by scientists on the invisible reality, nanostructures, atoms, molecules and the cosmos.

Such paintings are scientific drawings of men, yet they show something real. Similar to the sense and meaning of thoughts being present in linguistic sentences, the theoretic models show a reality which is invisible for the eye. Similarly interesting are the metaphors, symbols and analogies which cannot be conceived without images. Certain thoughts cannot be said without visualisation. They apparently do not belong to reality, though exist in the human world of thinking and sensing.

Rübsaamen’s work is characterised by a thematic vocal trio; it comprises the relationship between reality and its perception, the image power of the language and linguistic power of the paintings, as well as the symbolisation and ability to experience of invisible processes. They are experiments of interpreting – not only in art – the experience of the uncertain as constant of human existence.

Qu’est-ce que l’avenir nous apportera? One should be curious to wait for the next coups artistiques of Dieter Rübsaamen (1)

(1)
Lothar Romain deals in detail in a catalogue contribution (1988) with the informal work and its implications. Evelyn Weiss appreciates in the same catalogue the comprehensive cycle “Viewing fields“. Brigitte Schad examines extensively the group of works “Symbols − codes − border areas“ in an exhibition catalogue (1982). Charles Rump presents in-depth the process art cycles, amongst others headed by “The big processor.“ The group of works “Beyond the silence – beyond the language“ are dealt with by, amongst others, Volker Adolphs and Johannes Stahl. The latter also examines the group of works “Shifted parallel actions in the sense of Musil“ (2003) – these works are shown in Bonn for the first time, impressions from a Transib journey of 10,000 km seen from the ground perspective and the bird perspective of 10,000 km.

(2)
Given the occasion, some biographic notes on Dieter Rübsaamen and his path of life amongst the two worlds of an artist and a jurist, who has largely financed his law studies and his law dissertation with painting and has been shaped by an artistic-protestant rectory, are called for. The father, also having painted, had provided him the artistic basic tools. It was possibly his father who taught him sincerity and the retrieval for knowledge. His mother played piano and had been educated as physician. Dieter Rübsaamen had been acting for more than 30 years as an administrative lawyer and surveyor in the cultural administration taking executive posts. In parallel, he has been working as an artist with above 100 domestic and international exhibitions. The author accompanied Rübsaamen through almost all phases. Douglas Swan, who also lived in Bonn before he tragically died, as well as Arie Ogen formed part of his narrower artistic environment; Walter Schmitz and Heinz Schlüter do it nowadays. The best connoisseur of his work had been his deceased friend Thomas Ungar, physicist from Prague / Tel Aviv, with whom Rübsaamen developed the Emotional Standard Meter. The cooperation with his gallery owner Barbara Cramer with whom he had performed together for over 20 years has been explicitly inspiring. This goes as well for his friendship with Manfred Grimm, a long standing companion since one of the first exhibitions. Manfred Grimm built a so called rolling painting machine which let a painting of about eight meters rotate on the occasion of the ART Cologne 1988. He himself created own photographic works based on multilayered paper works prefabricated by Rübsaamen which Manfred Grimm alienated with red light and which Rübsaamen again crossfaded with radiograms. Dieter Rübsaamen’s path of life has been formed in an interdisciplinary and versatile manner. His works are present on nearly all continents.

André Müller

Translated by André Müller and revised by Ciaran Morrisey